Source: https://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2018/12/index.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 10:24:07+00:00

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District Judge O'Connor on Sunday paved the way for an appeal of his decision declaring all of ACA constitutionally invalid, issuing a Final Judgment on Count I in accordance with FRCP 54(b) and a separate Order of a Stay and Partial Final Judgment pending appeal. The latter document gives reasons for certifying partial final judgment and for granting the stay. As to the latter, the court goes to great lengths to explain why the intervenor-defendant states are unlikely to succeed on the merits on appeal, reiterating its standing, merits, and severability analyses from the original order, but concluding that the equities favor a stay.
As has been the case all along, Judge O'Connor continues to make jurisdictional errors.
Jonathan Adler has a good takedown of the expanded standing analysis, in which Judge O'Connor continues to find injury from the existence of a law absent any risk that the law could be enforced against the plaintiffs. The court relies on the correct principle that a person need not violate a law to have standing, but ignores that those cases required the plaintiff to show at least a genuine threat that the law would be enforced against him and that some penalty would result. He insists that no case requires an assessment of whether the plaintiff is injured by "disregarding" the law. It is true that courts do not put it in those terms, but that is implicit in the requirement of a threat of enforcement, which is triggered by someone disregarding the law.
O'Connor relies on Steffel v. Thompson, in which standing derived from Steffel's stated intention to resume handbilling and the express threat of the police to arrest him for trespassing (as they had his friend) if he did so. He also relies on Clements v. Fashing, in which the plaintiffs (challenging a state law that deemed candidacy for one office as resignation of an existing office) did not announce their candidacy for office, because that announcement would be deemed a resignation. That is, the plaintiffs in both cases would be subject to some mechanism for enforcing the law and it was that enforcement mechanism that caused the injury. In no case did the court find injury based on a statutory obligation that provided for no means of enforcement and no consequences.
O'Connor also tried to get cute, noting that "Chief Justice Marshall never asked whether William Marbury would be injured if he ignored the law and began serving as a justice of the peace without an official commission from James Madison." But that is because Marshall recognized that had Marbury done so, court personnel would have ignored him, not given him a courtroom in which to work, not carried out his orders, and perhaps asked the the Marshals physically remove him from the premises. All of which reflects the enforcement of the challenged law.
Two additional thoughts on standing. First, in a prior post, Adler analogizes the mandate-with-no-penalty to 4 U.S.C. § 8, which provides that "no disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America" and enumerates what civilians and civilian groups cannot do with the flag. Obviously, the law is unenforceable under Texas v. Johnson. But we never get there, because the U.S. Code provides no mechanism for enforcement and imposes no penalties for failing to follow those rules. No court would accord standing to a plaintiff who argues "I want to use the flag as a covering for a ceiling (prohibited by § 4(f)), but I am refraining from doing so because I do not want to break the law," because the plaintiff would suffer no enforcement and sanction for using the flag to cover the ceiling.
Second, standing was established in part because the ban, even if not enforced to keep these plaintiffs out of the United States, sent a message of religious exclusion and made them feel less than full members of the community because of their religion. Some critics of those decisions derided this as "snowflake standing"--the plaintiffs feel bad and are hurt in their delicate snowflake sensibilities. But that does not sound much different than what the plaintiffs are arguing here-they will feel bad (their delicate sensibilities undone) if they have to act contrary to what the written law, otherwise unenforceable, requires them to do.
The point of these orders was to pave the way for immediate review of the declaratory judgment. All parties had asked for certification of interlocutory review under § 1292(b), but Judge O'Connor instead certified a final judgment on one-but-less-than-all claims. But on the Con Law listserv, Marty Lederman identified a problem--it is not clear that the court finally resolved even one claim. The plaintiffs asked for a declaration that the mandate is invalid and a permanent injunction prohibiting implementation or enforcement of ACA; the court granted the former, but never addressed or reached a conclusion as to the latter remedy. A judgment, even on one claim, may not be final if remedial issues remain on that count.
Another commenter on the listserv suggested two possible outs. One would be to deem the certification of finality as the denial of the injunction. A second would be to treat the improper Rule 54(b) certification as a § 1292(b) certification and proceed that way. Otherwise, the court would have to dismiss the appeal for lack of jurisdiction and send the case back to the district court to enter the injunction (thereby creating appellate jurisdiction under § 1292(a)(1)) or to certify under § 1292(b).
One question is why Judge O'Connor proceeded this way, since the parties all requested a § 1292(b) certification and not a 54(b) certification. One thought is that he did not want to certify that there could be "substantial ground for difference of opinion" as to constitutional validity or severability. O'Connor has gone to great rhetorical lengths in all of his opinions and orders to make this seem like an obvious, not-at-all-close case with one obvious result, in which defendants can prevail only by demanding that courts acts in an invalid, unlawful, illegitimate, impermissible activist way. Section 1292(b) would require Judge O'Connor to declare that it might be possible for a court, acting in a legitimate way, to reach a different conclusion. That he does not want to certify.
The Ninth Circuit accepted the district court's § 1292(b) certification in the climate-change litigation, paving the way for review of the denial of motions to dismiss for failure to state a claim, lack of standing, and other bases. This after a series of failed attempts by the government to get the Ninth Circuit or SCOTUS to grant mandamus, stay the case, or provide other relief. Dissenting, Judge Friedland suggested that the district court did not genuinely believe the requirements of § 1292(b) were met and did not "so state," especially as to whether immediate review would "materially advance the ultimate termination of the litigation," and the the district court was strong-armed by the government's repeated attempts to bypass normal litigation procedures.
The thing that has bothered me all along is I do not see how the first prong of § 1292(b) is satisfied--that the interlocutory "order involves a controlling question of law," which should be limited to purely legal questions such as the meaning of a law, not to questions of application of known law to fact. The court found that plaintiffs have standing and that the plaintiffs stated a claim, accepting as sufficiently pleaded a creative application of the state-created danger theory of substantive due process. Standing is not purely legal--the requirements of standing are well-known, the issue here is whether they were satisfied. Perhaps the allowance of the state-created danger theory would qualify. But then what about the non-legal issues? dDoes everything else (such as standing) go with it on pendent appellate jurisdiction? Is the standing question "inextricably intertwined" with the constitutional question over which the court of appeals has jurisdiction?
Meanwhile, all sides are urging the district court in the ACA litigation to certify its decision under § 1292(b). This reads as a more appropriate case for interloctuory review, as the court decided an obvious question of law as to the constitutional validity of the individual mandate and the severability of the rest of the statute. And then does the standing decision (which should be the appropriate basis for getting rid of this case) similarly go along for the ride on pendent jurisdiction?
An area of seeming confusion for courts is the collision between Younger abstention and lack of jurisdiction under Rooker-Feldman. The doctrines are similar, as they both limit the power of federal courts to interfere with state adjudicative proceedings. In theory, the line is sharp--RF prohibits actions that formally or functionally ask the federal court to review the state decision, while Younger prohibits federal courts from halting ongoing state proceedings. In practice, they seem to run into one another, especially when courts use Younger as the basis for dismissing challenges to non-final state orders.
This seems wrong on several levels.
First, the point of Younger is to eliminate federal interference with state proceedings; that interference remains after the state proceeding ends, if the federal action seeks to undermine or undo the results of that state proceeding. This is the point of Wooley v. Maynard (the "Live Free or Die" license plate case). Maynard had been convicted of traffic offenses three times for covering the motto on his plate; all three proceedings were over. The Court held the federal suit not Younger-barred only because he did not challenge or affect the results or consequences of those prior convictions and sentences; he sought only to prevent future enforcement of the law against him. The implication is that had Maynard sought to undo the past convictions, Younger would have barred the action. This federal action seeks to do what Maynard did not--invalidate the result of the state proceeding; that seems inconsistent with "Our Federalism."
Second, even if Younger does not bar the federal action, Rooker-Feldman should. The plaintiff challenges the order of a state court suspending him from the practice of law and a federal judgment in his favor would declare that order as erroneous. In fact, attorney discipline is one of the most common situations for RF. And there is no "state court lacked jurisdiction" exception to RF.* The Tenth Circuit may have wanted to punt that issue to the district court. But this action should not go forward.
[*] In any event, I would argue that the plaintiff's argument as to the state proceeding is not that the state courts lacked jurisdiction, but that state law (attorney regs) does not apply to him because he is not barred in Colorado. That is a merits challenge to the reach of state law, not a jurisdictional challenge to the power of the court.
During the winter break, I always find myself with more time than usual for pleasure reading. My usual fare is relatively light and escapist. But, based on a recommendation, I recently picked up The Woman at the Washington Zoo. The Woman at the Washington Zoo is a collection of writings by Marjorie Williams. Williams made a name for herself writing political profiles for the Washington Post and Vanity Fair. The book contains several of those profiles, as well as more personal essays about parenthood, the death of her mother, and her own battle with cancer.
Even though I finished the book a week ago, it has really stuck with me. The profiles provide a fascinating glimpse into the political world of the late 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Although many of the names and events were familiar to me, as someone who graduated from law school in 2002, I found the inside-the-beltway chatter about these people and events to be a great revelation. I didn’t pay any attention to politics until the 2000 election, and so my understanding of the political landscape from the 1980s and 90s is limited and based mostly on present day sources. But the current view of that landscape is quite different than the contemporaneous view.
For example, Williams remarks, essentially in passing, that people in Washington did not think highly of Ronald Reagan’s presidency; they worried that he was beholden to the far-right and that he was a passive player in the White House. That does not match up at all with the description of Reagan that one encounters in modern public discussions. Reagan is one of many examples. The essay on Barbara and George Bush was also surprising, as the picture that it painted of the 41st President was not particularly consistent with the many profiles about him that appeared in the wake of his recent death.
Of these political writings, I found William’s essay about Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal to be the most thoughtful. Williams frames her essay by asking why feminists are unwilling to criticize Clinton for his affair with an intern---a question that has gained new prominence in light of the #metoo movement. Although the essay was clearly written at the time of the scandal, the perspective that Williams brings to the question is so fresh that it could have been written today.
Not to ruin the ending—but it gets sad at the end. As I mentioned above, Williams was diagnosed with cancer, and she ultimately died. The book was edited and published after her death by her husband, Timothy Noah, who is an editor at Politico. Normally, I don’t like to read anything that is particularly sad. I don’t like sad movies or television shows either---I like my pleasure reading and watching to serve as a light-hearted diversion from everyday life. But William’s brings the same thoughtfulness and perspective to her essays about her illness as she does to her essays about politics: She is writing about cancer, but she is also writing about life, family, and ideas.
Anyway, as I said, the book left a mark. And so I thought I’d share.
On Thursday, I did an interview with Brian L. Frye (Kentucky) for his Ipse Dixit Podcast on my new book on the infield fly rule. It was a fun conversation.
Baseball historian (and paralegal) Richard Hershberger for the fall 2018 issue of SABR's Baseball Research Journal argues that the infield fly rule developed from the difficulty of defining and determining when an infielder had caught the ball. He traces the 20-year evolution of the definition of catch, including the development and use of a "momentarily held" standard for only infield-fly situations (the batter is out if the infielder "momentarily held" the batted ball). This marked an "expansion" of when the batter is out, removing for baserunners, umpires, and infielders confusion over when the ball was caught and thus over whether they were forced to run. The ultimate Infield Fly Rule took this to its logical conclusion, but rendering the batter out no matter if, how, or how long the infielder touched the ball.
I am sorry this paper was not out while I was writing the book; I would have enjoyed discussing and responding to it in the book.
One of the things that kept CoOp going toward the end, as the commenters there noted appreciatively, was all the hard work of Gerard Magliocca. In that spirit, I should note on this, the first occasion on which I have blogged in months, that everyone at Prawfs is hugely indebted to Howard Wasserman, our de facto senior partner, who continues to blog with frequency and energy and bears a disproportionate amount of the burden of administrative work as well as providing content. My thanks are accompanied by a mea culpa and a vow that I will post reasonably regularly during the spring semester--not good news for anyone in particular, to be sure, but certainly a token of gratitude to Howard and a recognition of my obligation to him and the blog (and to Dan).
Howard has also been responsible for bringing on board many of our guests, and to them and to him again we are grateful. One of the characteristics of Prawfs has always been that it is in part about being a law professor, and especially, in its early days, about being a young or junior law professor. I loathe the term "pre-tenured," which is indicative of problems with the tenure system and of excessive politeness and its effects on the English language, and prefer the old-fashioned "untenured." That is what most of us here were in the early days of Prawfs, and our excitement about this ridiculously fun and rewarding job and the need to discover things about it as we went contributed to our writing about these things. (In my case, there was the added view that every activity, including law and legal teaching, is as much a sociological, institutional, and economic as an intellectual endeavor and should always be examined in that light, from both an internal and an external perspective.) Years ago, I was reminded recently, I joked that eventually our discussions of law teaching would turn into posts about, say, lumbago and law teaching. Given that we are now more senior, our guests keep us fresh and remind us of the questions that occur to all of us as we start out in teaching. I hope those questions extend beyond placement angst and gossip about when journals are taking submissions and the like, and include teaching especially. I'm grateful to our continuing flow of guests both for their writing on particular serious topics and for reminding us of our pre-"get off my lawn" experiences as teachers and scholars, and to Howard for bringing them on board. People who are interested in spending a few weeks here, to discuss a particular project, legal question, or aspect of life as a law professor, are welcome to contact Howard or any of the rest of us. So are folks who used to belong to now-moribund blogs and would like to have the chance to still blog occasionally.
Howard's post and the interesting comments there discuss some reasons for CoOp's demise and general changes in legal blogging, including what Howard calls "the broader migration of this sort of legal writing to Twitter and Facebook." I would amend that to just Twitter, since I think people are using Facebook less. Although some questions were raised about Howard's statement, I think he's right. Indeed, although I hate Twitter, I post on it more than I do on the blog these days. Since I don't care much about having a "social impact" or something of the sort and would rather not have a large readership on Twitter--it seems to me more often to have a negative than a positive influence on those who do--the fact that I write more there certainly doesn't have to do with a desire for influence. And my overlong writing is perfectly ill-suited for Twitter. So why Twitter rather than the blog, both on my part and for legal writers using social media in general? A few thoughts follow.
First, as Howard notes, some blogs are still very active and some of those seem still to be widely read, although it may be that blogs like Take Care (which I don't read) and the people who write there have more influence through Twitter than directly through the blog. And a couple blogs are still mainstays. The legal academy and people interested in new legal scholarship still benefit immensely from Larry Solum's Legal Theory Blog in particular. (One aspect of that blog that is noticed less often but is more necessary these days is its weekly book recommendation, which is vital in an age in which there are more books by law professors but fewer notices and reviews in law journals. The St. John's Law and Religion Forum is also great on this and quite catholic in its book recommendations.) But it does seem to be the case that bloggers are less active and blogs are read less routinely.
Some of this comes down to exhaustion and other such factors. I wrote about this and other influences on long-term blogging in a post some time ago. I won't repeat all I wrote there. I will note a couple of things, though. The bloggers who remain most active and can keep it up over years are often those who have a particular topic they are moved to write about, either something directly in their field or a personal hobby-horse or both. Generalists find it harder to keep it up long term; and although we all have our hobby-horses, some of us don't want to ride them too often and repetitively. There is still good reason to read and write specialist blogs, and it's harder to dig deeply into those issues as easily on Twitter, even if the blog post becomes more of an occasion for linking and then talking about it on Twitter. Those who aggregate, like Larry (although he clearly puts work into reading as well as aggregating pieces), and those who have a particular topic or hobby-horse that is an ongoing passion, will find it easier to keep going over the long haul and may find that not all of their needs are satisfied on Twitter. For those of us who, as I said in the earlier blog post, also want to write about the positive aspects of the first two Star Trek reboot movies and the dreadful nature of the third, or about (this semester's amateur fascinations for me) jazz, jazz history, jazz drumming, the great Steven Wilson, Epictetus and esoterica and Confucius, it's easier to do so on media like Facebook (or Twitter, although my sense is that for the writers I'm thinking about this happens less often there, to my regret, because people are still thinking about something like their "brand" and also because wider audiences and the culture of the medium may make one-off twits, especially jokes, more perilous on Twitter; I save most of my humor, which is not perfectly safe or reverent, for Facebook, where my "friends" are used to my sense of humor and tend both to enjoy and to understand and discount it, and even there I occasionally trim my list of "friends" with that in mind).
Some writers no doubt want to have "influence," and specifically influence in what we might call the political world rather than the academic world. If that is one's goal, it's understandable that one would spend more time on Twitter. Some of those writers are honest brokers and gain reputations for being reliable and fair. Others, it seems to me, have large numbers of followers despite the fact that--or, really, because--they are highly partial, partisan, and sometimes overly emotional writers on Twitter. They satisfy some general readers' need for solidarity and to have their priors reinforced and ready-made arguments for their cause supplied. In some or many cases, general readers may believe that because these arguments come from academics or experts, they are reliable and authoritative, although others in the field might suggest otherwise. This is not the place--I mean, who wants to read a long blog post?--to discuss arguments about academics' professional or ethical duties on Twitter, if any such duties exist. I think they do. But in any event, one can always rest on the notion that there are irreducible moral or ethical obligations on everyone's part, and perhaps especially on the part of "experts," that attach to everything they do and certainly to their public and political statements and interactions, whether we think of them as having anything to do with academic ethics or not. If one seeks influence by trading on authority, if it's not a fair and honest trade it can reasonably be seen as questionable behavior. For those who value integrity and care above propaganda or sophistry, nothing trumps one's fundamental moral and ethical obligations of honesty, fairness, candor, nuance, and so on. I feel sure that given today's coin of the realm, Richard Rich would have found a way to get a blue checkmark on Twitter, and that one could have raised the same questions about this that Thomas More asked about Rich's being made Attorney General for Wales. For myself, I worry that I have too many followers on Twitter as it is, although gaining a large number is never going to be an actual problem for me.
For me, at least, the reason I am more likely to post something on Twitter than on the blog is a somewhat perilous combination of ease and immediacy. The Twitter platform makes it easier to write something quickly and put it up instantly. Even a multi-twit post, which most of mine are, is easier to knock out from one's phone while walking the dog. I don't write blog posts on my phone, so I need to pull out a laptop or sit at my desk to write a blog post. The Typepad platform is perfectly friendly, and no doubt so is its app, but to write a blog post that is not a simple one-sentence link ("Interesting." "Highly recommended." "Hmm." "Problematic!") takes at least a little time and effort. And for those of us who favor an endless number of caveats and nuances and a parade of commas, dashes, parentheses, and semicolons, it takes still more time. Twitter feels easier, more immediate, and less consequential--although, as many have learned, in our polarized, combative, and punitive culture the last is certainly untrue. The very fact that you are reacting (it is indeed frequently a reaction) to the news of the day makes it easier to feel that little turns on your tweet, that it's a grain of sand on the beach, and that you need not (and cannot, given character limits) say much and can always post again, or simply let your earlier twit fade into obscurity, when it turns out that the story was more complicated than the first take suggested.
One might say something similar about reading it. Although I have an aversion to Twitter, I find it easy and addictive to turn to when walking the dog, even when I bring a book along, as I generally do, and even though I generally only read the Twitter pages of 3-5 people rather than plunging through the entire swamp. My spending more time there as a writer than I do on the blog, and spending some time there as a reader (although I spend time on my diminished number of go-to blogs), thus has less to do with the fact that the conversation has "migrated" there or the amount of content there, although those are contributing factors, and more to do with the ease of access and its suitability to short-term reading and reaction. And I might add something about emotion and about the outrageous story or anecdote of the day (or hour). Whatever your predilections and prejudices, you can more quickly and easily find some item there--fourth-place candidate in obscure local primary race says horrible thing, single unimportant professor at unknown university speaks outrageously or is treated outrageously, major gas planet loses rings, president of large and powerful country animadverts excitedly or boasts idiotically, etc.--to pique your interest and stoke your outrage. Since blogs are generally more selective and less immediate and emotional, you'll find fewer such links there. Twitter is a much better place to excite one's feelings that the world has collapsed, that you are losing your side of the culture war, or whatever else gives you a form of immediate pleasure or sensation.
Despite all this there are, of course, useful aspects to Twitter and useful writers or threads there. Many of them, in fact, although unless one is highly selective and resists the baked-in addictive qualities of that medium and the many temptations to lose oneself in trivia and outrage, they are harder to find or more easily outweighed by all the trash and ephemera. I intend neither to bury Twitter (quite) or to praise it. But given some of the factors above, along with things like the large potential audience (for those who care about this), the sensation or illusion that it is read more frequently and avidly, the number of serious people on it (whether they behave like genuinely serious people on it or not), and the sense of engagement it exudes, it's understandable that it's often easier and more tempting to turn to that medium than to a blog. Especially for those of us who are not hobby-horse riders or fear becoming hobby-horse riders, it's easier to get some thought off one's chest quickly by using Twitter. The same impulse might fade and die by the time one got around to opening a computer and drafting a blog post (which is almost certainly a point in favor of blogging).
People who insist on the value of things like immediacy, audience, currency, letting no news slip by without comment, "engagement," and other such factors will find much to like about that platform. They will find less to like about blogs, which may have seemed immediate once upon a time but, like the difference between having both morning and afternoon editions of newspapers and having access to a 24-hour news channel, now seem slower and more antiquated by comparison. And the network effects--the smaller number of people writing regularly on blogs and the larger number of people twitting regularly--will encourage more migration. Such is life.
But, as most of what I've written above suggests, these things also have costs and perils. Virtually everything I have described as a possible virtue of Twitter is quite obviously also a potential vice. It is not an especially healthy culture or discourse. The relentless focus on the immediate makes a decent perspective on what is real news and what is trivia or ephemera unlikely, and outrage or similar emotional responses the usual and often disproportionate response to everything. It's far from clear that keeping up to date on the news is an absolute good, especially when it is measured in intervals of seconds, minutes, and hours rather than days, weeks, and years. In general I learn more that is useful about the contemporary world by reading Epictetus or Dostoevsky than by reading about some event that happened seconds ago. The number of news stories devoted to reprinting Twitter debates (stories that are cheap and easy to produce and guaranteed to find readers) rather than, say, careful investigative reporting (expensive, time-consuming, demands more expert and thus more expensive reporters, not guaranteed to result in a lot of content or much readership) encourages stenography and pot-stirring rather than serious reporting, and is one more example of the way in which both technology and the desperate urge to stay alive in an inhospitable environment have harmed journalism rather than enlivening it. Nor is it necessarily good even for serious writers and thinkers who take advantage of Twitter, and/or law professors and other academics. The desire for general "influence" is understandable but not a clear positive good for academics. That desire may encourage the political rather than the expert and disinterested character of academics' public writing. And, as I've suggested elsewhere, we should consider the possibility that despite the insistence that one's scholarship and one's public and political activities are separate and unrelated or are pursued in different ways, one's twitting may affect or infect one's actual scholarship and/or its perception.
One could go on about Twitter's potential vices and their relationship to vices or sicknesses in our general culture. None of this is surprising. There are very few unalloyed and unqualified enthusiasts about Twitter. Even most of those who think the platform as such is epiphenomenal and not much related to its content or to the culture (I disagree), or who think it is much more of a good than a bad thing, or think that criticisms of Twitter easily tend toward exaggeration or hysteria (possibly true) readily acknowledge its faults. Somewhat more interesting to me is how many people, whether critics or fans of Twitter, think and worry about contemporaneity, "relevancy," and especially immediacy itself and their downsides. But that question is hardly unknown either. And although I have not seen all the responses I would like--in particular, major and somewhat conservative changes in institutional print journalism--clearly the rise of various platforms like Medium and other sites for longer-form writing by various writers suggests a recognition of these problems and some attempt to balance them with other forms of communication.
I offer no prescriptions or predictions. I think blogs have faded and will continue to do so, that they will not necessarily die, and that there is still definite value in them. That's especially true of the more subject-specific blogs but also of mixed blogs like this one. I think the migration to Twitter will continue, whether I like it or not. Even though doing so rests completely in my own hands, I suspect that even when I know or think that some piece of writing is better suited to this medium than to Twitter, and even if I conclude that Twitter is awful and harmful, that (unless I quit it altogether) I will still turn to it to post rather than to the blog, at least unless I devote meaningful and consecutive time to blogging (which might be better spent, not twitting, but doing more scholarly writing or other useful activities) and avoid absolutely the temptation of short takes and immediate reactions--a temptation that is part of what makes Twitter successful, addictive, and arguably deforming of individual and social character. But there's still a place for what we do here too. I hope to do more of it next year. In the meantime, my condolences to CoOp and my thanks to Howard for his role here at Prawfs.
Good analysis from Nicholas Bagley (Michigan) about the standing problems for the two individual plaintiffs in the ACA litigation. A few additional thoughts.
• This illustrates how enforcement is the trigger for constitutional litigation, not the existence of a constitutionally defective law. An invalid legal obligation that will not be enforced cannot be the subject of litigation. An invalid legal obligation that will be enforced through a tax penalty of $ 0 is, functionally, a legal obligation that cannot be enforced. It still would be better if we discussed this as a question of merits and not jurisdictional thresholds. If these plaintiffs are not injured because the law cannot be enforced against them in any way, then their substantive constitutional rights are not being violated.
• The plaintiffs' argument that they are injured because they believe following the law is the right thing to do (even when that law is not enforceable) is the flip side of requiring government officials to act lawfully or refrain from acting unlawfully (e.g., reservists in Congress, non-natural born citizens serving as President). Neither is a basis for standing.
• I have not seen any good argument that the 20+ States have standing. But the court skirted that question through the "one good plaintiff" rule--because someone had standing, the case could proceed without having to consider anyone else's standing. Update: In a companion piece, Bagley doubts that the 20 states have standing, which should mean the court cannot enjoin the Administration from enforcing the law as to him; in Bagley's words, the judge has "tied his own hands."
• Standing and jurisdiction have always been dicey in the ACA litigation; this case represents the latest and weakest effort. I wonder if the Fifth Circuit (or SCOTUS if it gets that far) will use that as the basis to get rid of this case, without having to touch the bizarre merits.
• Bagley describes standing doctrine as "near and dear to the hearts of the conservative legal establishment," so that even conservative judges on the Fifth Circuit (and Roberts and Kavanaugh on SCOTUS) will be unlikely to allow this sort of case to go forward. But the doctrine developed when the conservative legal establishment was trying to stop environmentalists from preserving the Nile crocodile, lawyers from challenging unwarranted surveillance of their foreign clients, and atheists from challenging states' creative ways to give government funds to parochial schools. This is the ideological drift of standing--the doctrine may not be so near and dear when it prevents "two guys from Texas" from taking down the nation's health-care system.
Sam Bray (as always) beat me to exploring the remedy issues in the district court's declaration on the constitutional invalidity of all of DACA. The court declared ACA invalid in its entirety, but declined to issue an injunction and provided only a declaratory judgment. Here is the wind-up to the post, with which I entirely concur.
In analyzing the effect of the declaratory judgment, then, there are two mistakes to avoid. One is saying the government can ignore it because it's "only" a declaratory judgment. That is incorrect; it is a real judgment, and unless stayed by the district court or an appellate court it deserves the adherence accorded to any other judicial judgment. The other is saying the government is bound to follow the judgment with respect to everyone, party or not. In effect, we would be treating the remedy as a "national declaratory judgment." That, too, is incorrect. To give such a remedy is beyond the judicial power.
I also want to flag this language from Marty Lederman's post: "[C]ontrary to almost every media account you've read in the past few hours (come on, New York Times!) Judge O'Connor did not "strike down" the "entire Affordable Care Act" (something he lacks the power to do, in any event) . . ." A federal court cannot erase or eliminate or remove a statute, so it would be wonderful if that term could be removed from the lexicon.
Update: The other procedural/remedial issue is what happens next. The court granted what it called partial summary judgment on one claim (or one issue in one claim) and entered a declaratory judgment, but no injunction (although that is what the first count of the complaint requested). But it is not clear what is appealable here and how. There is no injunction, so § 1292(a) is not in play. Section 2201 says a "declaration shall have the force and effect of a final judgment or decree and shall be reviewable as such," but the view among limited cases is that this assumes the decision is otherwise-final in the sense of disassociating the district court from the case and leaving it nothing to do but execute the judgment. With other claims remaining in the case, this D/J is not final. An appeal would seem to require certification under § 1292(b) or Rule 54(b).
Then there is a question of who can appeal. The United States agrees with the plaintiff states' basic constitutional argument about the zeroed-out penalty and that some provisions are not severable, so it is unlikely to appeal that; it disagrees with severability as to the rest of ACA, so it may appeal that. But what about the core constitutional issues? States were allowed to intervene to defend the parts of the law that DOJ would not, but under Hollingsworth an intervenor that would not be subject to the force of the order would not have standing to appeal. The House likely will intervene come January 3 and would have standing under Windsor, but that would be too late to appeal for § 1292(b), which requires appeal within ten days of certification. Maybe DOJ will appeal the declaration as a whole, then limit its legal arguments, with the states again intervening in the Fifth Circuit to pick up the slack.
The ever-harrowed Ninth Circuit tapped the brakes slightly on district courts issuing universal injunctions. In affirming on the merits an injunction barring enforcement of religious opt-out rules from the contraception mandate in an action brought by five states, the court held that the district court abused its discretion in having the injunction extend beyond the plaintiffs.
The court hit a few important notes. It emphasized that universality is generally disfavored and especially disfavored absent class certification. It highlighted the problems with universal injunctions, including the loss of percolation of issues, the effects on non-plaintiffs, and the risks of forum shopping. And it applied the "complete relief" principle to conclude that a particularized injunction gives states complete relief from the economic harms the opt-out rule would impose on them. That other states may suffer similar harms did not affect the plaintiff states.
The court made clear that universal injunctions are not prohibited, but must be limited to cases in which broad relief is necessary. And it said the issue (as with an earlier case rejecting universality as to sanctuary cities) was a failure to develop the record as to other states, suggesting that building a better record may justify universality.
But the court grappled with the scope question, a step back from recent hints from that court that universal injunctions were becoming the default, at least in certain cases.
Are politically motivated crimes by racists hate crimes?
James Alex Fields, Jr., who drove his car into a crowd of people in Charlottesville and killed counter-protester Heather Heyer, was convicted on Friday of first-degree murder, along with eight counts of malicious wounding. Sentencing begins Monday.
Fields also faces multiple federal hate-crime charges under § 249 for causing death or bodily injury because of the "actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin of any person" and under § 245 for using force to interfere with person's enjoyment of protected activities on the basis of race.
My question: How is what he did a racially motivated hate crime? The one person killed was white, as were many of the people injured. The DOJ press release announcing the indictment (from June) described Fields driving into a "racially and ethnically diverse crowd," seeming to suggest that Fields was targeting African-Americans and a group of people affiliated with African-Americans. But did he target that group because of their race (or the race of some of them)? Or did he target them because they were counter-protesters holding certain beliefs about racial, religious, and ethnic equality? The latter is not covered by either § 249 or § 245. And it would seem to stretch "perceived race" to cover people who are not part of some group but support rights and equality for that group.
At best, this crime seems politically motivated--Fields appears to be a racist and he picked victims who disagree with his positions. But is that a race-base hate crime?
I understand there had been some problems with the Comments sections. That problem has been resolved and comments can be made on all open posts.

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