Source: https://leastdangerousblog.com/2017/06/20/back-in-time-scotuss-week-in-review/
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 11:21:55+00:00

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Peruta (Question Presented: whether the Second Amendment protects a right to carry handguns, concealed or open, outside of the home, when open carry is forbidden under state law).
The statute at issue “enacts a prohibition unprecedented in the scope of First Amendment speech it burdens.” To “foreclose access to social media altogether is to prevent the user from engaging in the legitimate exercise of First Amendment Rights. . . . convicted criminals . . . might receive legitimate benefits from these means for access to the world of ideas . . . .” According to the briefs, North Carolina has prosecuted over 1,000 people for violating the statute.
The very purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the speech of disfavored minorities. Signaling out this speech for prosecution—without any allegation that it relates to conduct or even motive—has earned the Tar Heel State a big “dislike” from the Supreme Court.
When a party seeks to assert an implied cause of action under the Constitution itself, just as when a party seeks to assert an implied cause of action under a federal statute, separation-of-powers principles are or should be central to the analysis. The question is ‘who should decide’ whether to provide for a damages remedy, Congress or the courts? . . . The answer most often will be Congress.
In an exciting development for qualified immunity skeptics, Justice Thomas wrote separately (concurring in part and concurring in the judgment) to note his “growing concern with our qualified immunity jurisprudence.” Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Professor Will Baude, said he is “glad to see somebody on the court asking whether the qualified immunity doctrine is legally justified in its current form.” Professor Baude has previously suggested that the Court’s modern qualified immunity doctrine is probably not justified. As Baude explains, Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion comes at an interesting time, given that another case on petition for certiorari, Surratt v. McClaran, might be the “appropriate case” for the Court to reconsider its qualified immunity doctrine.
Justice Breyer dissented, joined by Justice Ginsburg. He wrote that plaintiffs’ claims in this case “fall within the scope of longstanding Bivens law” and do not require any extension of that jurisprudence, notwithstanding the majority’s reasoning to the contrary. Recognizing that the Court “has been reluctant to extend Bivens liability to any new context or new category of defendants,” Justice Breyer nonetheless admonished that “the Court has made clear that it would not narrow Bivens‘ existing scope,” which he felt occurred in this decision.
Justice Kagan took no part in the case, as she was in the executive branch when it began. Justice Sotomayor took no part in the case, as she was on the Second Circuit (the court below) when it first came up there. Justice Gorsuch took no part in the case, as he was not yet on the Court when the case was heard.
[s]ince Alabama’s provision of mental health assistance fell so dramatically short of what Ake requires, we must conclude that the Alabama court decision affirming McWilliams’s conviction and sentence was ‘contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law.’ 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1).
(1) When this Court held in Ake that an indigent defendant is entitled to meaningful expert assistance for the ‘evaluation, preparation, and presentation of the defense,’ did it clearly establish that the expert should be independent of the prosecution?
The Court explicitly only granted cert to review the first question, but Justice Alito felt that the Court essentially skipped the first question and resolved the second question. Because AEDPA restricts federal courts’ power to grant habeas relief to situations where the state court’s decision “was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States,” and because the question presented addressed a widespread split of authority as to the application of Ake, which “provides no clear guidance one way or the other” on the question presented, Justice Alito took issue with the Court’s resolution on the merits in finding that Alabama offended a “clearly established” federal procedural requirement.
Also, congratulations to Ilya Shapiro and the Cato Institute for getting a nice citation in the majority opinion to the “Brief of the Cato Institute and A Basket of Deplorable People and Organizations” (a hysterical brief, we might add).
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of Calif.
Joining the Court’s OT 2016 civil procedure cases is Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of Calif., another case, like BNSF v. Tyrell (which Joel wrote about in May), involving a door left open in Daimler AG.
Daimler and BNSF both addressed — and sharply narrowed — the extent to which the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause allows state courts to assert general personal jurisdiction over a defendant — i.e., a state court’s ability to assert personal jurisdiction over a particular defendant for any claim, by virtue of that defendant’s continuous and systematic contacts with the state. Bristol-Myers, however, addressed the issue of specific personal jurisdiction — i.e., a court’s ability to assert personal jurisdiction over a defendant who is not “at home” in the forum state, because the claim at issue relates to the contacts the defendant does have with the state.
Bristol-Myers involved a lawsuit brought in California state court by numerous plaintiffs, alleging that the defendant’s pharmaceutical Plavix had damaged their health. While the defendant company conducts business in California, it is not incorporated in California and it does not have its principal place of business there — in other words, the defendant is by no means “at home” in California, which effectively foreclosed the plaintiffs’ ability to plead general jurisdiction in the wake of Daimler (an intervening decision while Bristol-Myers was on appeal in the California state court). Additionally, many of the plaintiffs in the action were not residents of California and did not allege that they received the drug in California.
The California state court therefore asserted jurisdiction over the defendant with respect to the claims by all plaintiffs (in-state and out) based on an idiosyncratic theory of specific jurisdiction that employed a sliding-scale measuring: 1) a defendant’s general contacts with the form and 2) the nexus between such general contacts and the claims at issue. The California Supreme Court ultimately affirmed the lower state court’s assertion of specific jurisdiction because, while the out-of-state plaintiffs’ claims were not directly related to the defendant’s contacts with California, the extent of the defendant’s unrelated contacts made up for this tenuous relationship.
In other words, the California courts found that the defendant’s general contacts with the state fell short of justifying general jurisdiction under Daimler, but were weighty enough to justify specific jurisdiction despite the out-of-state plaintiffs’ claims lacking a connection to these general contacts.
the California Supreme Court’s ‘sliding scale approach’ is difficult to square with our precedents. Under the California approach, the strength of the requisite connection between the forum and the specific claims at issue is relaxed if the defendant has extensive forum contacts that are unrelated to those claims. Our cases provide no support for this approach, which resembles a loose and spurious form of general jurisdiction.
The Court left unresolved “whether the Fifth amendment imposes the same restrictions on the exercise of personal jurisdiction by a federal court,” an issue stemming back as far as the fractured 1987 decision in Asahi Metal Indus. Co.
At any rate, in light of Daimler, BNSF, and now Bristol-Myers, it is clear that litigants must be very precise in how they plead the facts they expect to justify personal jurisdiction. For general jurisdiction, a defendant must be essentially at home in the forum. For specific jurisdiction, the defendant’s relevant contacts are those relating to the claims at issue — and no amount of unrelated contacts can overcome that specific requirement. Daimler‘s dicta about the possibility of a defendant being “at home” despite lacking either incorporation or a principal place of business in the forum appears to be slowly evaporating as adventurous plaintiffs test novel jurisdictional theories and the Court repeatedly rebuffs them in doing so.
In a per curiam opinion, the Court reversed and remanded Jenkins v. Hutton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, holding the Sixth Circuit incorrectly held that it could review Percy Hutton’s claim under the miscarriage of justice exception to procedural default in a habeas proceeding.

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