Opinion ID: 200090
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Eleventh Amendment and as-applied challenges

Text: 20 Much legislation in which Congress invokes its section five power will prohibit at least some state action that is clearly unconstitutional under established judicial definitions of the Fourteenth Amendment — and for which Congress could therefore at least potentially provide a private action against the state. Title II of the ADA, for example, would prohibit the restrictive zoning practice that the Supreme Court held unconstitutional in City of Cleburne. In such cases, of which this is one, Congress may be viewed as simply providing remedies where the judiciary has already found a set of facts to violate the Constitution. 21 In other cases, as the Court has said repeatedly, Congress may enact valid enforcement legislation that prohibits conduct not in itself unconstitutional. The Court has recently used the Voting Rights Act as an example of permissible legislation enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment. Garrett, 531 U.S. at 373 (discussing South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 86 S.Ct. 803, 15 L.Ed.2d 769 (1966), which upheld that Act). When Congress does so, however, its enactment must survive judicial scrutiny more rigorous than that which the courts apply when Congress simply provides a remedy. See City of Boerne, 521 U.S. at 519-20 (While the line between measures that remedy or prevent unconstitutional actions and measures that make a substantive change in the governing law is not easy to discern, and Congress must have wide latitude in determining where it lies, the distinction exists and must be observed. There must be a congruence and proportionality between the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted to that end.). 22 Generally, a court will not strike down a statute as unconstitutional unless it is convinced that the statute is unconstitutional on the facts of a specific case, that is, as applied to the party that argues for unconstitutionality. See United States v. Raines, 362 U.S. 17, 21, 80 S.Ct. 519, 4 L.Ed.2d 524 (1960) ([O]ne to whom application of a statute is constitutional will not be heard to attack the statute on the ground that impliedly it might also be taken as applying to other persons or other situations in which its application might be unconstitutional.). 23 In some areas of the law, a party may sometimes argue for a statute's unconstitutionality even though, as a matter of doctrine, the party's own interests in the specific case are not directly protected by the Constitution. That argument is a facial challenge, as distinct from a challenge to the statute as applied. The most well-known examples occur in the context of the First Amendment, in the doctrines of overbreadth and vagueness. There, a speaker whose own speech is unprotected (because, for example, it is obscene) may nevertheless escape prosecution for that speech based on an argument that the statute would also apply to protected speech, or is so unclear as to chill protected speech. See Broadrick v. Oklahoma, 413 U.S. 601, 611-15, 93 S.Ct. 2908, 37 L.Ed.2d 830 (1973); see also City of Chicago v. Morales, 527 U.S. 41, 55, 119 S.Ct. 1849, 144 L.Ed.2d 67 (1999) (plurality opinion) (discussing facial challenges to statutes based on constitutional provisions other than the First Amendment). See generally R. Fallon, As-Applied and Facial Challenges and Third-Party Standing, 113 Harv. L.Rev. 1321 (2000) (analyzing the precedent and theory of facial challenges). 24 This case presents the question of whether New Hampshire may assert its Eleventh Amendment immunity against a suit under Title II alleging conduct by the state's agents that, if it occurred and was not adequately justified, violated the Constitution, 4 based on the argument that Title II also subjects the state to private suit for conduct not required by the Constitution, and arguably not within Congress's section five power. The Supreme Court has not yet said whether the Eleventh Amendment, with its associated principle of state sovereign immunity, is among the constitutional doctrines that necessarily require a particular congressional enactment to be either wholly constitutional or wholly unconstitutional. 5 We conclude that the concerns that justify facial challenges are not present in this area of the law, and we view this case as a challenge to Title II as applied. 25 A review of the Court's precedent supports our conclusion that this question is as yet unanswered. In Seminole Tribe, the question presented to the Court was purely one based on Congress's ability to regulate commerce with the Indian Tribes, U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 3; there was no argument to be made that the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act enforced the Fourteenth Amendment, even in part. 517 U.S. at 60. In Florida Prepaid, the Court said nothing about the possibility of upholding the Patent Remedy Act as applied, although Justice Stevens in dissent argued that the statute could and should be so upheld. 527 U.S. at 653-54 (Stevens, J., dissenting). On the majority's view of the case, however, the Court's holding that even a state's patent infringement violates due process only if the state provides no state law remedy to the injured patent holder meant that no constitutional violation had in fact occurred. Florida Prepaid, 527 U.S. at 643; see also id. at 644 n. 9 (noting that Florida does in fact provide such a remedy). In the companion case of College Savings Bank v. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board, 527 U.S. 666, 119 S.Ct. 2219, 144 L.Ed.2d 605 (1999), the Court's section five analysis began and ended with its conclusion that trademark rights were not property rights, at least within the context of the Fourteenth Amendment. Id. at 672-75. Therefore, the challenged statute involved no constitutional violations. In Kimel, which involved three separate cases, consolidated by the Eleventh Circuit, the Court did not go into detail regarding the facts of the plaintiffs' cases. The facts it did recite do not include any specific mention of irrational actions by the state defendants that would have violated the Equal Protection Clause. See 528 U.S. at 69-70. Finally, in Garrett, the Court's description of the facts leaves little doubt that the Constitution was not violated by the actions of Alabama in that case. See 531 U.S. at 362 (describing the refusal of the University of Alabama to allow a Director of Nursing to take leave while she underwent chemotherapy, and that of the Alabama Department of Youth Services either to modify a security officer's duties to permit him to avoid carbon monoxide, or to allow him to work daytime shifts). 26 Moreover, Garrett implies that the Court's recent sovereign immunity jurisprudence is consistent with a step-by-step, as-applied analysis of congressional power to authorize private suits against the states, where the facts of the statutory claim also make out a constitutional one. The Court chose to address only Title I, and to dismiss the writ of certiorari to the extent it covered Title II. 531 U.S. at 360 n. 1. To some extent, of course, this suggests merely that the Court found the provisions of Title II, as they purport to authorize a suit against the states, severable from those of Title I. The same abrogation provision, however, applies to both Title I and Title II — indeed, to the entire ADA. See 42 U.S.C. § 12202. It thus requires no great leap from the Court's position in Garrett to separate out, within Title II, cases that involve constitutional violations from those that do not, as we do today. See Fallon, supra, at 1331 (discussing the links between the concept of statutory severability and the preference for as-applied adjudication). This circuit's precedent in Eleventh Amendment cases follows the Court's approach in Garrett. See Laro v. New Hampshire, 259 F.3d 1, 9 & n. 6 (1st Cir.2001) (considering whether Congress could subject the states to private suit under one provision of the Family and Medical Leave Act, without reaching the question as to the other provisions). 27 Nor are broadly available facial challenges in Eleventh Amendment and state sovereign immunity cases (where the facts pled amount to a constitutional violation) necessary to preserve the states' interests in those cases. There is no question in American constitutional law that two principles constrain Congress's ability to authorize private suits against the states as sovereigns: the states' interest as sovereigns in avoiding suits to which they do not consent, and the states' financial interest in controlling disbursement from their own treasuries. See Fed. Mar. Comm'n v. S.C. State Ports Auth., ___ U.S. ___, ___, 122 S.Ct. 1864, 1874, 152 L.Ed.2d 962 (2002) (The preeminent purpose of state sovereign immunity is to accord States the dignity that is consistent with their status as sovereign entities.); id. at 1877 (noting that state sovereign immunity [also] serves the important function of shielding state treasuries and thus preserving `the States' ability to govern in accordance with the will of their citizens') (quoting Alden v. Maine, 527 U.S. 706, 750-51, 119 S.Ct. 2240, 144 L.Ed.2d 636 (1999)). 28 In a case that involves a constitutional violation, a given suit places no greater burden on a state's dignity or fisc if the challenged statute also authorizes suits in other cases. In areas where facial challenges are permitted, by contrast, it is often because the particular activity protected by the Constitution — such as the freedom of speech or the right to an abortion — is particularly vulnerable to statutes that discourage without clearly prohibiting its exercise. Broadrick, 413 U.S. at 612; see Morales, 527 U.S. at 55 (plurality opinion) (citing Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth, 428 U.S. 52, 82-83, 96 S.Ct. 2831, 49 L.Ed.2d 788 (1976)). But the states are familiar with the requirements of constitutional law, and the Eleventh Amendment is concerned not with making room for allegedly illegal state conduct but instead with insulating the states from private suit. Thus, there is no affront to protected dignity or fiscal interests from requiring the states to appear and defend their conduct when Congress has provided the remedy of a private suit for a specific constitutional violation. Without such concerns at stake, we follow the traditional approach of taking small steps and considering separately the separate applications of a statute.