Source: https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/conlaw/2009/09/index.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 02:21:16+00:00

Document:
The California Assembly earlier this month passed a bill, AB 590, to direct court fees and fines to services designed to promote and enhance access to the judiciary and to a pilot project to appoint legal counsel to low-income parties in "civil matters involving critical issues affecting basic human needs . . . ." Under the pilot project, "proposals to provide counsel in child custody cases should be considered among the highest priorities for funding, particularly when one side is represented and the other is not." The LA Times on Friday encouraged the governor to sign the bill.
The doctrine of equal justice under the law is based on two principles. One is that the substantive protections and obligations of the law shall be applied equally to everyone, no matter how high or low their station in life. The second principle involves access to the legal system. Even if we have fair laws and an unbiased judiciary to apply them, true equality before the law will be thwarted if people cannot invoke the laws for their protection. For persons without access, our system provides no justice at all, a situation that may be far worse than one in which the laws expressly favor some and disfavor others.
Many judicial leaders acknowledge that the disparity in outcomes is so great that indigent parties who lack representation regularly lose cases that they would win if they had counsel. A growing body of empirical research confirms the widespread perception that parties who attempt to represent themselves are likely to lose, regardless of the merits of their case, particularly when the opposing party has a lawyer, while parties represented by counsel are far more likely to prevail. . . .
Equal access to justice without regard to income is a fundamental right in a democratic society.
The U.S. Supreme Court has never gone so far. The Supreme Court has treated claims for civil counsel under the procedural due process test in Mathews v. Eldridge. The Court in Mathews determined the constitutionally mandated process by balancing the litigant's interest, the government's interest, and the risk that the process used would lead to an erroneous deprivation.
Federal constitutional claims for civil right to counsel have always run up against Lassiter and its presumption. But litigants have successfully won a state constitutional right to counsel in several states under state due process and equal protection principles.
California, through its majoritarian processes and not its courts, now is poised to add itself to the growing list of states that recognize a constitutional civil right to counsel.
This was, of course, easier to say in his day, when legislatures, for the most part, were more progressive than courts.
At more than 950 pages, the biography promises to be comprehensive. In the excerpt, Urofsky notes that Brandeis was not an introspective man, making the biographer's efforts at portraying Brandeis' inner life rather difficult. But given Brandeis' active and multiple careers, there is certainly much to interest readers.
A person's constitutional rights may be curtailed simply because she or he attains the age of sixty-five.
This is the startling conclusion of Outliving Civil Rights, 86 Washington University Law Review 1053 (2009), by Professor Nina Kohn (pictured below) of Syracuse University College of Law.
limit older adults’ substantive due process rights by criminalizing certain forms of consensual sexual behavior; others undermine older adults’ informational privacy rights by requiring the doctors, attorneys, priests, or other confidants to report suspected abuse or neglect to the state.
Laws that criminalize sexual activity with older adults—laws that deem their sexual partners to be felons— further entrench this stereotype of sexuality on the part of older people as perverse.
Elder sexual protection statutes also create collateral consequences that are analogous to those that burdened the liberty interests of Texas homosexuals in Lawrence. Persons convicted under the Texas anti- homosexual conduct statute faced collateral consequences, including inclusion in criminal registries and negative consequences for future employment. Collateral consequences are also significant in elder abuse cases, although somewhat less direct. Persons convicted of sexual abuse of older adults are increasingly likely to be barred from working with or caring for the elderly. The “abused” adult may face unwanted protective action such as involuntary isolation from the “abuser” or involuntary removal from a shared accommodation with the “abuser.” In addition, as discussed earlier, persons investigated as victims of elder abuse are highly likely to be institutionalized as a result and are also at disproportionate risk of having their right to make personal choices eliminated through the imposition of a guardianship.
Kohn makes clear that her ultimate objective is less a blueprint for constitutional challenges to elder-protection laws than a rethinking of the paternalistic approach of such laws. She notes that elder abuse laws have most often been modeled on child-abuse laws (at 1108). (And while the courts have been explicit about the lesser constitutional rights of minors, they have not been willing to generalize substandard constitutional status for the elderly). She suggests that a better model is domestic violence. Id. (Although it might be argued that violence against women policies have not always accorded women full constitutional status).
On C-Span on video here. The newest Justice describes the call from President Obama, the drive to Washington, D.C., and preparing for her first speech.
Is an Individual Health Insurance Mandate Constitutional?
David Rivkin and Lee Casey this week argued in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that the mandatory insurance provision in Senator Baucus's health reform bill is unconstitutional.
1. Congress lacks authority under the Commerce Clause to require individuals to purchase insurance, because a "health-care mandate would not regulate any 'activity.'" The authors reference United States v. Lopez and Gonzales v. Raich.
3. But this "excise tax" is plainly a penalty, pushing the bounds of the Supreme Court's Taxing Clause jurisprudence. The authors: "The Supreme Court has never accepted such a proposition, and it is unlikely to accept it now, even in an area as important as health care."
The authors are wrong on two counts. First, an individual mandate is almost certainly the kind of economic activity that the Court would uphold under Congress's Commerce Clause authority under Raich, Lopez, and United States v. Morrison. These cases allow Congress to regulate activities that have a "substantial effect" on interstate commerce, and they look to the commercial nature of the activity and to the connection between the activity and interstate commerce (among other considerations). An individual mandate is almost surely commercial in nature--in requiring folks to buy health insurance, it requires a commercial exchange. Rivkin and Casey argue that the mandate is not commercial in nature, because it's triggered simply by "being an American." This may be true, but it misses the point of the regulation: It requires Americans to engage in a commercial exchange. This is the definition of commerce.
Moreover, the individual mandate is closely related to interstate commerce. The whole argument for an individual mandate is to get health care consumers to internalize their costs, and not spread them to the larger interstate economy. A health insurance mandate is almost certainly within Congress's Commerce Clause powers, whether Congress calls it an "excise tax" or something else.
Second, Rivkin and Casey misunderstand the Taxing Power. Congress can adopt an excise tax to an end that is within its other constitutional powers, as here. But even if Congress is acting outside its other articulated powers, the Court has interpreted the Taxing Power quite broadly, all but eliminating any distinction between a "penalty" and revenue-producing "tax." See United States v. Kahriger (upholding a federal tax on gambling under Congress's Taxing Power) (overturned on other grounds).
The Supreme Court may be on a path to limiting congressional authority under the Commerce Clause, the Taxing Clause, or any clause. But even so, the individual mandate all too squarely falls within the recent and settled jurisprudence.
We've posted on similar constitutional issues in the health care reform debate here, here, and here.
The administration has asserted or reasserted this version of the privilege in about a dozen cases. (Here's my post on one.) Congress had its own ideas, here and here.
In the wake of all this, Holder's memo yesterday sought to rein in the government's use of the privilege. Holder's memo establishes new internal procedures for DOJ review of administration assertions of the state secrets privilege, sets a new standard for internal review, and specifically rules out the use of the privilege in certain circumstances.
More particularly, the memo requires the assistant AG to recommend invocation in any particular case, a review committee to approve that recommendation, and then the AG to sign off. (This is presumably in addition to the asserting agency head sign off, under U.S. v. Reynods.) The memo also says that the DOJ will defend an assertion only after a "sufficient showing that assertion of the privilege is necessary to protect information the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause significant harm to the national defense or foreign relations." And the memo rules out assertions to conceal illegalities, to prevent embarrassment, to restrain competition, and to prevent delay of information that would not cause harm to national security. Finally, the memo provides for regular reports to Congress on assertions of the privilege.
But the memo doesn't specifically back off the administration's re-assertion of the Bush administration argument that the privilege has a basis in the Constitution--that it's compelled by separation-of-powers principles and by the president's Article II authorities. This extraordinary and novel claim, argued the Bush and Obama administrations in the Mohammed case, elevated the privilege to constitutional status and insulated it from judicial review. Under this view, the administration alone could assert the privilege to dismiss a case on the pleadings, and the court couldn't even second guess the assertion.
Moreover, the memo rules out seeking full dismissal of a case "when doing so is necessary to protect against the risk of significant harm to national security." But this should always have been the administration's standard for moving for complete dismissal of a case.
Holder's memo represents a significant change in the procedures and internal checks on the government's assertions of the state secrets privilege. It also includes a new, meaningful oversight role for Congress. But less clear is what, if any, substantive changes it reflects in the administrations' most sweeping position on the privilege--that it has a constitutional (and not merely evidentiary) basis.
A group of Illinois voters last week argued their case to the Seventh Circuit that Illinois law providing for the appointment by the governor of a person to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat runs afoul of the Seventeenth Amendment. The oral argument, about 33 minutes, is here.
10 ILCS Sec. 5/25-8. Governor Quinn, Blagojevich's replacement, made no attempt to revoke or alter the appointment, and he didn't call for a special election. Indeed, under the plain language of 5/25-8, the next election would be in November 2010--the "next election of representatives in Congress," and, coincidentally, the date on which Obama would have faced re-election (because his term ended in 2011).
U.S. Const. Amend. XVII. The plaintiffs argued that Illinois law failed to provide for a special election to fill the rest of Obama's term. The regular election next November doesn't qualify, they argued, because that election is the regular election for the Senate seat. (Curiously, they argued that a special election on election day 2010, right along with the regular election, would satisfy their demands. Illinois used a similar special election in the primaries to replace former House Speaker Dennis Hastert when he resigned. But it's not clear what plaintiffs would gain from this process.) Plaintiffs argued that their position is most consistent with the spirit of the Seventeenth Amendment, which, they say, is that the people should elect their (regular) Senator, even if the legislature may authorize the governor to appointment a (temporary) Senator.
Is the Massachusetts procedure, providing for a true special election by the people, more consistent with the text and purpose of the first clause of the Seventeenth Amendment? Perhaps. But this isn't to say that Illinois's procedure violates the Seventeenth Amendment. On the contrary, Illinois is well within the plain text and scant judicial interpretations of the second clause of the Seventeenth Amendment. The Judge plaintiffs' concession that even a special election on election day 2010 (right along with the regular election), and two years after the vacancy, illustrates their extreme position based on a strained reading of the text.
The New York Court of Appeals (New York's highest court) has ruled today by a vote of 4-3 that Governor Paterson's appointment of a lieutenant governor is constitutional, opinion available here. The Court is reversing the lower court opinion holding the appointment unconstitutional (our previous discussion here).
Tony Mauro at the National Law Journal reports today that plaintiffs' groups are moving to reverse Ashcroft v. Iqbal, last term's decision holding that complaints must allege more than mere "threadbare recitals of the elements of a cause of action" to survive a motion to dismiss.
Iqbal involved a former detainee's Bivens claims against former AG John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller for constitutional torts while in custody. (I originally posted on the case here.) The ruling meant that plaintiffs faced, in effect, a heightened pleading standard, and federal courts dismissed a slew of cases on "Iqbal motions." In one notable case just this month, however, the Ninth Circuit ruled that a plaintiff sufficiently pleaded facts to sustain an Iqbal motion in a case against former AG Ashcroft for indefinitely detaining him in violation of the federal material witness statute.
Mauro reports that plaintiffs' groups are looking to Congress (in Senator Specter's legislation with the title that speaks for itself, "Notice Pleading Restoration Act of 2009") and the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Civil Rules (with the argument that the Court mucked up the FRCP, and the Committee should set them right).
The President famously announced last week in his healthcare address to a joint session of Congress that he would order the Agency for Healthcare and Research Quality, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, to support state demonstration projects on medical liability reform. The initiative appears to be an attempt to reach across the aisle to Republican opponents of the President's plan, who have argued that medical liability reform--or "tort reform"--is an essential part of any healthcare reform plan. The President's memo for the Secretary of HHS is here.
On the very same day last week that the President sent his memo to the Secretary, the Supreme Court of Washington issued an opinion reminding us that whatever the federal government may support, there still may be some limits on medical liability reform. Particularly, state constitutional "open courts" provisions may restrain some states in "demonstrating" their reforms.
Open courts jurisprudence is notoriously muddled. But there is one consistency: Open courts attacks on state medical liability reform and, more generally, tort reform--strict damage caps, short statutes of limitations, and the like--have mostly failed.
This may be all the more reason to pay attention to Washington's ruling.
The people have a right of access to the courts; indeed, it is "the bedrock foundation upon which rest all the people's rights and obligations." This right of access to courts "includes the right of discovery authorized by the civil rules." As we have said before, "[i]t is common legal knowledge that extensive discovery is necessary to effectively pursue either a plaintiff's claim or a defendant's defense."
Requiring medical malpractice plaintiffs to submit a certificate prior to discovery hinders their right of access to the courts. Through the discovery process, plaintiffs uncover the evidence necessary to pursue their claims. Obtaining the evidence necessary to obtain a certificate of merit may not be possible prior to discovery, when health care workers can be interviewed and procedural manuals reviewed. Requiring plaintiffs to submit evidence supporting their claims prior to the discovery process violates the plaintiffs' right of access to courts. It is the duty of the courts to administer justice by protecting the legal rights and enforcing the legal obligations of the people. Accordingly, we must strike down this law.
There's certainly nothing unconstitutional (federal) about the federal government funding state demonstration projects related to medical liability reform. But unless the President's demonstration program includes a preemption provision--which would seem both unlikely (because the whole point is to support new state laws experimenting with reform) and extraordinary (because it could only be designed to impede state constitutional rights that might get in the way of state reforms)--states are still bound by their constitutions. The Washington Supreme Court's ruling is a healthy (pardon the pun) reminder that state constitutional rights are still relevant and may play an important role in state reform efforts.
In the NYRB article "The Torture Memos: The Case Against the Lawyers," David Cole (Georgetown) provides a brief rehearsal of the major arguments, legal authorities, and chronologies surrounding the attorneys Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Daniel Levin, and Steven Bradbury, the authors of the so-called "torture memos."
Cole's ultimate conclusion is that the "least President Obama should do, therefore, is to appoint an independent, nonpartisan commission of distinguished citizens, along the lines of the 9/11 Commission, to investigate and assess responsibility for the United States' adoption of coercive interrogation policies."
It's a relatively brief article intended for a general (if sophisticated) audience; it would make a great basis for a class discussion, simulation, or exercise in a law school, graduate, or undergraduate constitutional law class.
Caperton Conference at Seattle U.
Seattle University hosted a conference this week on Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., the case from last term holding that the Due Process Clause required recusal by West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Brent Benjamin in a case where Benjamin received $3 million in contributions for his judicial election campaign from one of the parties. Professor Andy Siegel's (Seattle U.) blog post on the conference is here; we've posted on the case here and on Justice O'Connor's speech (at the conference) here.
The conference page contains links to two sessions and to Justice O'Connor's speech.
Thanks to Professor and Associate Dean Maggie Chon (Seattle U.) for the heads-up on the conference.
This measure, and others like it, would certainly run up against federal preemption under any comprehensive federal reform bill.
On the flip side, protesters again suggested at Saturday's protest on the National Mall that federal health care reform would increase the size and scope of the federal government beyond what the founders intended. But any federal reform measure currently in play would fit comfortably within Congress's authority under the Commerce Clause and the Court's "substantial effects" test--i.e., that Congress can regulate under the Commerce Clause anything that has a "substantial effect" upon interstate commerce.
Given the reality of federal supremacy, the expansive federal authority under the Commerce Clause, and a sprawling health care system that pervades the national economy (isn't that exactly the problem?), the state efforts to limit federal health care reform and the arguments that federal health care reform exceed the federal government's powers have no real traction in our federal constitutional system. But they seem to have garnered enough of a following to at least signal that some number think, on principle or merely because of politics, that the federal government has no business in health care reform.
David Souter, who in his nineteen years on the Supreme Court infuriated so many on the right by his refusal to advance the movement's pet judicial causes - - - instead immersing himself in the study of history, partly to uncover in the past "some relevance to a constitutional rule where earlier judges saw none" - - - may well endure as the most authentic conservative in the Court's modern history.
(at 117). Tanenhaus (pictured at right), the editor of both the NYT Book Review and NYT Week in Review, not only argues that Justice Souter is best understood as a conservative but that the present politics and culture of the US are best described as being in a conservative phase. This might make it seem that conservatism is very much alive, but Tanenhaus argues that conservatism as a politics has succumbed to conservatism as a "movement." Tanenhaus contends that postwar conservatism has been a debate between the "realists" (who uphold the 18th Century ideals of Edmund Burke of "replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions") and the "revanchists" (committed to a counterrevolution) - - - and that "at almost every critical juncture, the revanchists have won the argument." (at 20).
Since its founding, our nation has been productively divided between liberal and conservative impulses. They form the dialectic of our infinitely renewable politics.
(at 114). Whether this dialectic has actually occurred or has been "productive" remains, to my mind, very debatable. Nevertheless such a claim is not dissimilar to many constitutional history theories of adjustment, feedback, or even backlash. Thus, while not a book devoted to constitutional law, this brief book (120 pages and no footnotes) can provide insights that might be fruitful for one's own scholarship and teaching.
Her hearings could therefore have been a particularly valuable opportunity to explain the complexity of constitutional issues to the public and thus improve public understanding of this crucially important aspect of our government. But she destroyed any possibility of that benefit in her opening statement when she proclaimed, and repeated at every opportunity throughout the hearings, that her constitutional philosophy is very simple: fidelity to the law. That empty statement perpetuated the silly and democratically harmful fiction that a judge can interpret the key abstract clauses of the United States Constitution without making controversial judgments of political morality in the light of his or her own political principles. Fidelity to law, as such, cannot be a constitutional philosophy because a judge needs a constitutional philosophy to decide what the law is.
Dworkin also discusses Ricci and Sotomayor's statements on foreign law. It's an article worth reading (and there is also a podcast discussion).
Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. Sec. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.
50 U.S.C. Sec. 1621 authorizes the President to declare such a national emergency.
The extension is written in language very close to President Bush's original declaration; it breaks no new ground, and we can't make any inferences about the administration's constitutional positions on presidential war-time or emergency powers. Instead, the extension probably only reflects the administration's continued need for flexibility in troop deployments in active military and combat zones.
A divided three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled last Friday that plaintiff Abdullah al-Kidd pleaded sufficiently specific facts to withstand former AG John Ashcroft's motion to dismiss his case for unlawfully using the federal material witness statute, 18 U.S.C. Sec. 3144, to detain him preventatively, without charges.
The panel ruled that Al-Kidd's complaint satisfied the pleading standard that the Supreme Court articulated last term in Ashcroft v. Iqbal. Recall that in Iqbal the Court refined the pleading standard in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombley and held that "[t]hreadbare recitals of the elements of a cause of action, supported by mere conclusory statements, do not suffice [and] only a complaint that states a plausible claim for relief survives a motion to dismiss." The Court ruled that Iqbal's allegations were "conclusory and not entitled to be assumed true," and therefore failed to meet this standard. According to Adam Liptak at the NYT, the case was cited more than 500 times in the two months after it came down and, according to Prof. Burbank at Penn (quoted in Liptak's story), resulted in "a blank check for federal judges to get rid of cases they disfavor."
Here, unlike Iqbal's allegations, al-Kidd's complaint "plausibly suggest[s]" unlawful conduct, and does more than contain bare allegations of an impermissible policy. While the complaint similarly alleges that Ashcroft is the "principal architect" of the policy, the complaint in this case contains specific statements that Ashcroft himself made regarding the post-September 11th use of the material witness statute. . . . The specific allegations in al-Kidd's complaint plausibly suggest something more than just bare allegations of improper purpose; they demonstrate that the Attorney General purposefully used the material witness statute to detain suspects whom he wished to investigate and detain preventatively, and that al-Kidd was subjected to this policy.
Similarly, al-Kidd's claims here that Ashcroft promulgated and approved the unlawful policy which caused al-Kidd "to be subjected to prolonged, excessive, punitive, harsh, unreasonable detention or post-release conditions." Contrary to the Sec. 3144 claim, however, the complaint does not allege any specific facts--such as statements from Ashcroft or from high ranking officials in the DOJ--establishing that Ashcroft had personal involvement in setting the conditions of confinement.
In the wake of Iqbal, the case leaves open the possibility that certain claims, sufficiently supported by, e.g., direct policy statements of officials, may survive a motion to dismiss. Between the complaint and the opinion, the case provides a roadmap for plaintiffs, at least for now in the Ninth Circuit.

References: v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v.