Tag: Fourteenth Amendment

Another Judicial Takings Case Reaches the Supreme Court

By
Ilya Shapiro

For over a century, Montana citizens have used non-navigable streambeds along their properties for various purposes without objection from the state government.  The hydroelectric energy company PPL Montana and thousands of other private parties exercised their rights over these non-navigable stretches that the state never claimed. 

Last year, however, the Montana Supreme Court overturned well-settled state property law by effectively converting the title in hundreds of miles of riverbeds to state ownership. The majority of the court ruled that the entirety of the Missouri, Clark Fork, and Madison rivers were navigable at the time of Montana’s statehood, producing a broad holding that eradicates the right to use rivers and riverbanks that Montanans had enjoyed for over a century.

PPL Montana thus asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the state court’s decision; Cato filed an amicus brief supporting that request, which the Court granted.  Now that the case is before the Court, Cato has joined the Montana Farm Bureau Federation, American Farm Bureau Federation, and National Federation of Independent Business on a brief supporting the property owners.

We are chiefly concerned with two parts of the Montana Supreme Court’s ruling:  First, the court incorrectly evaluated navigability for the purpose of establishing title – finding the entirety of the rivers at issue navigable (and thus belonging to the state) because portions of them are – contravening the legal standard established by the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Utah (which analyzed the riverbeds section-by-section to achieve a “precise” assessment of navigability).  Second, the court effectively transferred a substantial quantity of land from private owners to the state – a judicial taking that violates either the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendments (as the Court described in the recent Stop the Beach Renourishment case, in which Cato also filed a brief).  

In short, the Court should reaffirm the Utah standard for navigability in the context of establishing title and protect private property owners against judicial takings.  By doing so, it would send a strong message to state courts across the nation that judicial usurpations of property rights are just as unconstitutional as those undertaken by other branches of government.

The Court will hear the case of PPL Montana, LLC v. Montana late this year or in early 2012.  Again, you can find Cato’s brief here.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

Chicago Still Disrespects Second Amendment

By
Ilya Shapiro

That’s the upshot of a recent decision by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Ezell v. City of Chicago.  This was a challenge to the new regulations the city enacted in the wake of McDonald v. City of Chicago case, which applied the Second Amendment to the states. 

In an attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s clear holding, Chicago’s ordinance first mandates that would-be gun owners receive training at a firing range but then prohibits firing ranges from operating in the city.  The court, in a striking opinion by Judge Diane Sykes (put her on your Supreme Court shortlist for the next Republican administration), tells the city to go back to the drawing board.

I won’t go into the details, but the court applied something greater than intermediate (but “not quite strict”) scrutiny and found that Chicago has not presented anything approaching a compelling reason for its restriction.  Here’s an analysis of the opinion by Josh Blackman and some follow-up commentary from Cato associate policy analyst Dave Kopel.

Gratifyingly, Judge Sykes cites the Pandora’s Box article that Josh and I published early last year in the run-up to the McDonald argument (see footnote 11 on page 31).  It’s quite an honor to appear in the same footnote as Randy Barnett, Steven Calabresi, Brannon Denning, Glenn Harlan Reynolds (the Instapundit), and many other noted scholars – including Akhil Amar, who in the wake of our Obamacare debate and bet may not appreciate it as much.

Congratulations to the intrepid Alan Gura (who also litigated McDonald and Heller v. District of Columbia) and to all the citizens of Chicago!

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

Magna Carta Day

By
Roger Pilon

The liberties we Americans enjoy were hard-won over the centuries. Today we mark a major event in that struggle, the day in 1215 when English barons presented King John with a written list of rights they demanded he recognize. Known ultimately as Magna Carta, the Great Charter, it was a compact between the barons and their king, a political effort by subjects to secure their liberty by placing their ruler under the rule of law, thus limiting arbitrary power.

The charter has gone through several iterations, but it drew in part from the common law rights, especially rights of property, that judges in the king’s courts had been finding from reason and custom as they decided controversies the king’s subjects brought before them. What Magna Carta did was bring those same rights against the king. Most important for us today was the promise found in clause 29:

No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or deprived of his freehold or of his liberties or free customs, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, nor shall we go upon him, nor shall we send upon him, except by a legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

Note first the broad terms of clause 29: that enabled it to apply not just to the issues at hand but to varied future situations. Second, notice that only “freemen” were protected. The barons came to realize, however, that if their rights were to be maintained against the king, they would need the cooperation of all classes. Thus, the charter came in time to protect “common” liberties.

Each of those issues has informed the American experience. First, Magna Carta itself inspired our Founders to limit power through a written document, our Constitution. Second, clause 29 is captured in the Fifth Amendment, which provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. And third, Magna Carta’s capacity to grow is reflected by the post-Civil War inclusion of the Due Process Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. That brought the Bill of Rights to bear not only against the federal government, its original limit, but against the states as well. We owe much to this English inheritance.

Cross-posted at the National Constitution Center’s Constitution Daily.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties, Political Philosophy

If Only Hawaii’s Government Were as Beautiful as Its Beaches

By
Ilya Shapiro

Throughout history, people have fought over beaches, including in the legal arena. In the latest case in which Cato has filed an amicus brief, a state has once again redefined property rights to take possession of highly-valued beachfront property.

In 2003, Hawaii passed Act 73, which took past and future title to accretions (the slow build-up of sediment on beaches) from landowners and gave it to the State, changing a 120-year-old rule. While waterlines are unpredictable, the original rule — common to most waterfront jurisdictions — helped establish legal consistency. Indeed, without such a rule, beachfront property becomes beachview property in just a few years.

In response to Act 73, homeowners sued the state, claiming that the law violated the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment or, in the alternative, the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The state appellate court held that compensation was owed only for the accretions that had accumulated before Act 73’s enactment because the right to subsequent accretions had not “vested” (the legal term for when an expectation becomes an actual property right). Hawaii’s Supreme Court declined to review that ruling, so the property owners asked the U.S. Supreme Court to do so.

Cato, joined by the Pacific Legal Foundation, filed a brief supporting that petition and argues that the appellate court’s decision was contrary to long-standing definitions of waterfront property rights. Our brief highlights the increasing need for the Court to establish and enforce a judicial takings doctrine.

More and more states are using backdoor tricks — like legislative “guidelines” and judicial creativity — to take property in violation of constitutional rights: This Hawaii case is distressingly similar to last term’s Stop the Beach (in which Cato also filed a brief). In that case, Florida took property by adding sand to the beach and then laying claim to the newly created land — in essence asserting that property that was defined by contact with the water (in technical terms, “littoral” or “riparian”) had no right to contact the water. The Court ruled that while Florida’s actions did not rise to the level of a judicial taking, a large enough departure from established common-law rules could constitute a constitutional violation.

In this latest brief, we highlight both the largeness of Hawaii’s departure from established law and the spate of such actions in recent years — which circumstance calls out for Supreme Court review.  The case is Maunalua Bay Beach Ohana 28 v. Hawaii and the Court will decide later this fall whether to take it up.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

Nat Hentoff on ‘Stop & Frisk’ Police Tactics

By
Tim Lynch

Nat Hentoff  has a terrific column in the Village Voice on the stop and frisk tactics of the New York City Police Department.  Here’s an excerpt:

Commissioner Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg, your stop-and-frisk approach trashes the Fourteenth Amendment. So while Governor Paterson merits our cheers for not being at all intimidated by you, a lot more has to be done to bring the Constitution back into New York City.

A co-sponsor of the bill, Assemblyman Jeffries, reminded all of us (The New York Times, July 16) that the signing of the bill was “the beginning point, not the end point, of a larger evaluation of the effectiveness and legitimacy” of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk electronic dragnet.

Since there will continue to be stops, questions, frisks—and some arrests—I would be grateful, Commissioner Kelly, for your reaction to this tiny but very inflammatory story buried at the very bottom of page 14 in the July 10 Daily News, “Cuffed Brooklyn Woman Hit Back at Cops.”

The story describes that, in a lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court, two Brooklyn women, Taneisha Chapman and Markeena Williams, “claim they were wrongfully arrested by the NYPD after following the advice of a flyer (by the American Civil Liberties Union) entitled: ‘What should you do if stopped by the police?’ ”

When stopped by cops last August outside the Marcy Houses and asked to produce identification, they showed the flyer (commendably issued by the office of Assemblyman Nick Perry, Democrat, East Flatbush) that says—and James Madison would have fully approved—“It’s not a crime to refuse to answer questions. You can’t be arrested for merely refusing to identify yourself on the street.”

Daily News reporter John Marzulli wrote: “The cops were apparently in no mood for a legal debate and hauled off both women to Brooklyn Central Booking. The unspecified criminal charges were later dismissed, according to the suit.”

Read the whole thing.

For related Cato work, go here and here.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

Justice Thomas, Pandora, and Stephen Colbert Walk into a Gun Store…

By
Ilya Shapiro

My sometime co-author Josh Blackman points out a parallel between Justice Thomas’s fascinating concurrence in McDonald v. Chicago – which extended the right to keep and bear arms to the states – and the “Keeping Pandora’s Box Sealed” article we published earlier this year.

Justice Thomas in McDonald v. Chicago:

With the inquiry appropriately narrowed, I believe this case presents an opportunity to reexamine, and begin the process of restoring, the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment agreed upon by those who ratified it.

Blackman & Shapiro in Pandora’s Box:

The purpose of this article is to provide a roadmap to welcome the Privileges or Immunities Clause back into constitutional jurisprudence. The Slaughter-House Cases “sapped the [Privileges or Immunities Clause] of any meaning”  but the Supreme Court now has the opportunity correct this mistake.  Taking up Justice Thomas’s gauntlet, we “endeavor to understand what the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thought” the Privileges or Immunities Clause meant, and seek to restore that original meaning.

Relatedly, for my attempt to explain the meaning of the right to keep and bear arms while talking to a crazy character and a humorless gun-control advocate, see my recent appearance on the Colbert Report.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

More on Property Rights (Plus Privileges, Immunities, Due Process)

By
Ilya Shapiro

Yesterday I blogged about the Florida property rights case, which I now consider the best unanimous opinion against my position I could ever imagine.  Although the property owners lost, four justices stood for the idea that courts no less than legislatures or executive bodies are capable of violating the Takings Clause (Fifth Amendment), while two others endorsed remedying such violations via Substantive Due Process (Fourteenth Amendment), and the remaining two didn’t express an opinion one way or the other.  For more on the case, see the blogposts of Cato adjunct scholars Tim Sandefur, Ilya Somin, and David Bernstein.

An interesting side note involves Justice Scalia’s excoriation of Substantive Due Process (and Justice Kennedy’s use of it):

Moreover, and more importantly, JUSTICE KENNEDY places no constraints whatever upon this Court. Not only does his concurrence only think about applying Substantive Due Process; but because Substantive Due Process is such a wonderfully malleable concept, see, e.g., Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558, 562 (2003) (referring to “liberty of the person both in its spatial and in its more transcendentdimensions”), even a firm commitment to apply it would bea firm commitment to nothing in particular.

…

The great attraction of Substantive Due Process as a substitute for more specific constitutional guarantees is that it never means never—because it never means anything precise.

Scalia also calls Kennedy’s method “Orwellian”  – after having said that Justice Breyer uses a “Queen-of-Hearts” approach “reminiscent of the perplexing question how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”  Really, this is classic Scalia, a delight to read (and you should, here).

The problem with what Scalia says, as Josh Blackman points out, is that the Court is about to release its opinion in the Chicago gun case, McDonald v. Chicago and, based on the oral argument, is about to incorporate the Second Amendment via Substantive Due Process.  If SDP is so bad, how can Scalia (endorsed by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas and Alito) use it to protect a “new” right? – particularly when the Privileges or Immunities Clause was created for just this purpose!  One answer is that, to Scalia, “babble” – his term for SDP – is still worth more than “flotsam” (his term for P or I), as I discuss here.  Another is that, to put it bluntly, Scalia is a results-oriented non-originalist, as Josh and I discuss here.

Speaking of Blackman-Shapiro collaborations, for the correct way to apply the right to keep and bear arms to the states, see our law review article called “Keeping Pandora’s Box Sealed.”  And Tim Sandefur, who authored Cato’s McDonald brief (read a summary here) just published a fascinating related article called “Privileges, Immunities, and Substantive Due Process.”  I haven’t read it yet but am very much looking forward to it. 

Tim also recently wrote a book defending economic liberties (which Justice Scalia also disparages in his Stop the Beach opinion), called The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Liberty and the Law.  I hear it makes for good beach reading.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

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