Opinion ID: 3035677
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Comity and the repugnance of unconstitutional

Text: injunctions We do not agree with the majority’s professed uncertainties as to whether a California court, under principles of comity, would be inclined to enforce a foreign court order that infringes upon a U.S. corporation’s First Amendment rights. The “repugnancy” standard the majority invokes is easily satisfied here. California’s case law and its federal underpinnings tell us to honor foreign court judgments unless they “prejudice the rights of United States citizens or violate domestic public policy.” In re Stephanie M., 867 P.2d 706, 716 (Cal. 1994) (citing Hilton v. Guyot, 159 U.S. 113, 202-03 (1895); and Victrix S.S. Co. v. Salen Dry Cargo A.B., 825 F.2d 709, 713 (2d Cir. 1987)). The French orders on their face — and by putting Yahoo! at risk of substantial penalties — violate the First Amendment and are plainly contrary to one of America’s, and by extension California’s, most cherished public policies.4 In short, they constitute a foreign judgment that is “repugnant to public policy.” (Op. at 436.) 4 As the majority correctly notes, it is California’s public policy (rather than U.S. public policy) that is relevant to a comity analysis in a federal diversity case. (Op. at 431.) However, although Yahoo! focused its energies on alleging violations of the federal First Amendment rather than violations of the analogous provision of the California Constitution, see art. I, § 2(a), it is certainly not California’s public policy to countenance violations of the United States Constitution. Indeed, the California Supreme Court has held California’s free speech clause to be more expansive than the First Amendment. See Golden Gateway Ctr. v. Golden Gateway Tenants Ass’n, 29 P.3d 797, 801 (Cal. 2001) (“Unlike the United States Constitution, which couches the right to free speech as a limit on 482 YAHOO! INC. v. LA LIGUE CONTRE LE RACISME The district court considered the role of comity but ultimately found that it was outweighed by U.S. constitutional freedoms. “Although France has the sovereign right to regulate what speech is permissible in France, this Court may not enforce a foreign order that violates the protections of the United States Constitution by chilling protected speech that occurs simultaneously within our borders.” Yahoo II, 169 F. Supp. 2d at 1192. This finding does not mean that every foreign court judgment implicating speech in the United States would be deemed repugnant to American public policy and therefore unenforceable, but this particular judgment is so vague and overbroad that it fails the repugnancy analysis. Significantly, the defendants do not argue to us that the French injunction comports with the First Amendment. Indeed, they did not even appeal the district court’s ultimate finding that the orders are unconstitutional. The majority goes to great lengths to avoid labeling a prior restraint on speech — overbroad and vague by its terms — as “repugnant to public policy” and is content to leave in place foreign court orders that so obviously violate the First Amendment. (Op. at 436.) In reaching this result, the majority has succumbed to an error of logic. It has conflated foreign orders that are somewhat inconsistent with U.S. law with those that violate U.S. law. It is one thing for U.S. courts to pass on foreign attorney’s fees larger than what domestic laws would award, see In re Hashim, 213 F.3d 1169, 1172 (9th Cir. 2000), or to recognize a judgment pursuant to a foreign statute congressional power, the California Constitution gives ‘[e]very person’ an affirmative right to free speech. Accordingly, we have held that our free speech clause is ‘more definitive and inclusive than the First Amendment.’ ”) (internal citations omitted). See also Sarl Louis Feraud Int’l v. Viewfinder Inc., 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 22242, at  (S.D.N.Y. 2005) (“American courts have recognized that foreign judgments that run afoul of First Amendment values are inconsistent with our notions of what is fair and just, and conflict with the strong public policy of our State [New York].”) (emphasis in original).” YAHOO! INC. v. LA LIGUE CONTRE LE RACISME 483 of limitations longer than that of its domestic analogue, see Milhoux v. Linder, 902 P.2d 856, 861-62 (Colo. Ct. App. 1995). It is quite another to imply, as the majority does, that a violation of the U.S. Constitution is no different from any other “[i]nconsistency with American law,” which the majority claims “is not necessarily enough to prevent recognition and enforcement of a foreign judgment in the United States.” (Op. at 435-36.) Neither In re Hashim nor Milhoux implicated federal or state constitutional rights. Indeed, both cases held that the foreign judgments being challenged were not repugnant to the public policy of either Arizona or Colorado, respectively. Where a foreign judgment was held to be repugnant to California’s public policy, the repugnancy was based on the violation of California’s Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act that would have resulted had the foreign order been enforced. See In re Stephanie M., 867 P.2d at 716. The majority provides no explanation why the California courts would refuse to enforce a foreign judgment that violated a state statute, yet be willing to enforce a foreign judgment that violates the federal (and perhaps the state) Constitution. The majority’s dictum implying that foreign judgments that would be unconstitutional if entered by a U.S. court may nonetheless be enforceable is troubling. Under the principles articulated today, a foreign party can use a foreign court decree to censor free speech here in the United States on any range of subjects it finds objectionable — religion, democracy, gender equality — in the name of enforcing its own country’s laws. The good intentions of even sympathetic foreign parties such as LICRA and UEJF in this case are not the standard. How could a California court honor the French defendants’ good intentions in proscribing pro-Nazi speech when the City of St. Paul’s good intentions did not cure its anti-hate speech code of viewpoint discrimination and constitutional infirmity even when directed at cross-burnings? See R. A. V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377, 392 (1992) (“St. 484 YAHOO! INC. v. LA LIGUE CONTRE LE RACISME Paul has no such authority to license one side of a debate to fight freestyle, while requiring the other to follow Marquis of Queensberry rules.”); see also Collin v. Smith, 578 F.2d 1197, 1201 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 439 U.S. 916 (1978) (striking down on First Amendment grounds several Skokie, Illinois ordinances prohibiting the National Socialist Party of America from marching through the town: “First Amendment rights are truly precious and fundamental to our national life . . . . It is, after all, in part the fact that our constitutional system protects minorities unpopular at a particular time or place from governmental harassment and intimidation, that distinguishes life in this country from life under the Third Reich.”) People in the United States and France should abhor antiSemitism and the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi Party. Nonetheless, our constitutional law differs from French jurisprudence in our approach to hate speech. Our law reflects deeply held political beliefs about freedom of expression in this country. Borrowing Justice Brandeis’s formulation, “the remedy to be applied [to expose falsehood and fallacies] is more speech, not enforced silence.” Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 377 (1927) (Brandeis, J., concurring).