Tag: PLF

Should You Need a License to Hang Curtains?

By
Ilya Shapiro

The latest example of liberty-reducing occupational licensing schemes comes to us from Florida, where a law restricts the practice of interior design to people the state has licensed. Those wishing to pursue this occupation must first undergo an onerous process ostensibly in the name of “public safety.”

In reality, the law serves as an anti-competition measure that protects Florida’s current cohort of interior designers. Our friends at the Institute for Justice have pursued a lawsuit against the law but lost their appeal in the Eleventh Circuit.

Cato has now joined the Pacific Legal Foundation on an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to review that ruling. The lower court got it wrong not just with respect to the right to earn a living, however, but also on First Amendment grounds.

That is, interior design, as a form of artistic expression, is historically protected by the First Amendment. Indeed, interior designers are measured primarily on the value of their aesthetic expression, not for any technical knowledge or expertise. This type of artistry is a matter of taste, and the designer and client usually arrive at the end result through collaboration and according to personal preferences. Thus, the designer-client relationship has little in common with traditionally regulated professions such as medicine, law and finance, where bad advice can have real and far-reaching consequences—but even then, the Supreme Court has emphasized the First Amendment implications of placing “prior restraints” on expression through burdensome licensing schemes.

Instead of following that precedent, however, the circuit court carved out a constitutionally unprotected exception for “direct personalized speech with clients.” Florida’s “public safety” justification is similarly weak, given that the state has presented no evidence of any bona fide concerns that substantiate a burdensome licensing scheme that includes six years of higher education and a painstaking exam—instead relying on cursory allegations that, for example, licensed designers are more adept at ensuring that fixture placements do not violate building codes.

Finally, the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling disregarded the infinite array of auxiliary occupations the Florida law subjects to possible criminal sanctions: wedding planners, branding consultants, sellers of retail display racks, retail business consultants, corporate art consultants, and even theater-set designers could all get swept in. The state has already taken enforcement actions against a wide spectrum of people who are not interior designers, including office furniture dealers, restaurant equipment suppliers, flooring companies, wall covering companies, fabric vendors, builders, real estate developers, remodelers, accessories retailers, antique dealers, drafting services, lighting companies, kitchen designers, workrooms, carpet companies, art dealers, stagers, yacht designers, and even a florist. This dragnet effect also suggests that the law is too broad to survive constitutional scrutiny.

The Court will likely decide by the end of the year (or early 2012) whether to take this case of Locke v. Shore.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties, Regulatory Studies

Race-Based Tax Exemptions Are Unconstitutional

By
Ilya Shapiro

Hawaii continues to think that it’s not quite part of the United States and thus not fully subject to U.S. law.

In the 2000 case of Rice v. Cayetano, the Supreme Court struck down race-based voting requirements for certain Hawaii state officers because government schemes that distinguish between “native Hawaiian” and “Hawaiian” are racial classifications that must pass “strict scrutiny” to be deemed constitutional; they must be narrowly tailored to achieve a truly “compelling” purpose (a standard nearly impossible to meet). Yet that exact same category of “native Hawaiian” — whose frighteningly archaic definition is “any descendant of not less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778” — was used in the Hawaii Homes Commission Act to distinguish those who can hold certain leases that are subject to little or no property tax.

A group of Hawaiians who do not meet the state’s definition of “native Hawaiian” and therefore suffer under the explicitly race-based law decided to challenge these property-tax exemptions. After paying their taxes, these plaintiffs sought refunds on the grounds that the classification scheme violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

The Supreme Court of Hawaii, however, ruled that they didn’t have standing — a legal doctrine that determines who can bring a claim — to challenge the taxes on the ground that they had not yet asked for the leases (for which they were indisputably ineligible due to not having enough “blood of the races” flowing through their veins). A lower state court had even ruled that the classification was not race-based—that it merely distinguishes leaseholders and non-leaseholders, even though Hawaiians without the sufficient “blood quantum” cannot be leaseholders!

The group of taxpayers now seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court. Cato, joined by the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, the Goldwater Institute, and Professor Paul M. Sullivan, filed a brief urging the Court to take the case and rectify Hawaii’s explicitly unconstitutional taxation scheme. We argue that, after Hawaii’s state judiciary refused to address the issue of racial discrimination head-on, only the U.S. Supreme Court is in a position to guarantee the constitutional protections that Hawaiians have lived under for over a century (since Hawaii became a territory). Only by taking this case and overturning the racially charged definition can the Court continue to ensure that Hawaii is a state that “neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”

The Supreme Court will likely decide by the end of the year (or in early 2012) whether to hear this case, Corboy v. Louie.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties, Tax and Budget Policy

Does Virginia Even Have Standing to Challenge Obamacare?

By
Ilya Shapiro

As I described yesterday in the context of Cato’s latest brief, Virginia’s challenge to the constitutionality of the individual mandate is now on appeal before the Fourth Circuit (the federal appellate court that covers Maryland, Virgnia, and the Carolinas).   Before the court even considers the constitutional merits, however, it must confirm that the state has standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place. 

Indeed, two amicus briefs filed by some law professors argue that the state does not have the legal power to challenge the constitutionality of Obamacare.  But Pacific Legal Foundation attorney and Cato adjunct scholar Timothy Sandefur filed a brief responding to those briefs and arguing that Virginia does have standing to bring the case.

Here’s the issue:  Article III of the Constitution only lets federal courts hear “cases and controversies,” which means that a plaintiff – whether an individual, a state, a corporation, or any other entity – must have been actually harmed in a way that courts can address.  For example, courts can’t review abstract political arguments or give advisory opinions.  Here, Virginia argues that it’s been injured because it passed a Health Care Freedom Act that prevents citizens from being forced to buy health insurance – which is obviously in conflict with the individual mandate.

The professors say, in contrast, that states can’t pass laws that conflict with federal law as a means of getting in court and challenging the constitutionality of the federal law.  They point to Massachusetts v. Mellon, a 1923 decision that said states don’t have the “duty or power to enforce … [citizens’] … rights in respect of their relations with the Federal Government.  In that field it is the United States, and not the State, which represents them as parens patriae….”  They argue that the “the state’s interest in enforcing its legal code must necessarily give way to federal law whenever a conflict arises,” and that “[m]anufacturing a conflict with federal law cannot of itself create an interest sufficient to support standing.”

PLF’s brief explains, however, that states have had the power to do precisely that since at least McCulloch v. Maryland, the 1819 case that upheld the constitutionality of the national bank (and which is central to the Necessary and Proper Clause analysis at the heart of the larger constitutional debate over Obamacare).  In McCulloch, Maryland passed a law taxing the bank simply to give it the ability to challenge the bank’s creation in the Supreme Court.  Although the Court found the bank constitutionally kosher, it never denied that the state couldn’t raise its claims.  And the Supreme Court has allowed states in many other cases to challenge federal laws that intrude on their constitutionally retained sovereignty.

In South Dakota v. Dole (1987), for instance, the Court allowed the state to challenge the constitutionality of laws that infringed on the power to regulate alcohol consumption (by tying federal highway funds to states’ raising their drinking age to 21) – a power that the Twenty-First Amendment leaves to states.  If states can defend powers retained by the Twenty-First Amendment, why can’t they defend powers retained by the Tenth Amendment? 

And states should have the power to bring these lawsuits, because the Founders intended for states to serve as a check against Congress going beyond its constitutional authority.  In Federalist 46, for example, Madison assured skeptics that states would have “means of opposition” against federal overreaching, and those means would include “the embarrassments created by legislative devices.”  States are supposed to defend their turf in the federal constitutional scheme.  As for cases like Mellon, PLF argues that these cases involved “political questions” and so were not rulings about standing: in those cases the states weren’t really exercising their sovereign powers.  But in this case, Virginia has clearly exercised its sovereignty by passing the Health Care Freedom Act.

Interestingly, one reason PLF argues that states should have standing to bring these cases is because there’s some question whether individual citizens are allowed to bring Tenth Amendment challenges.  That question will be resolved this term in Bond v. United States, a case in which Cato filed an amicus brief in December.  If individuals are hard-pressed to defend the federalist structure, then states certainly should be able to.

In short, PLF’s brief (which was also filed on behalf of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine and Matt Sissel, PLF’s client in a different Obamacare case) makes a complicated but crucial argument supporting states’ ability to defend federalism by challenging the constitutionality of federal overreaching.  More at PLF’s blog.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

Sure, You Can Get a Business License — If Your Competitors Approve

By
Ilya Shapiro

Our friends at the Pacific Legal Foundation have filed another important suit in the battle for the right to earn an honest living.  PLF senior attorney (and Cato adjunct scholar) Tim Sandefur has the scoop:

Michael Munie is a St. Louis businessman who’s been in the moving business since he was 16 years old. He has a federal license that lets him move people’s household goods from one state to another. And he has a state license that allows him to move things within St. Louis. But he’s not allowed to move things from St. Louis to anywhere else in Missouri unless he gets permission from his competitors first.

That’s right—Missouri law dictates that whenever a person applies for a license to run a moving business, the state’s Department of Transportation must notify all the existing moving companies and give them the chance to object. If they do—which, of course, they always do—the applicant must prove that there’s a “public necessity” for a new moving company. What does “public necessity” mean? Nobody knows. There are no standards, no rules of evidence, no nothing.

Read the rest and find out more here.  Cato doesn’t litigate, of course – other than filing amicus briefs – but we certainly support those that do, including PLF, the Institute for Justice, the Goldwater Institute, the Mackinac Center, and many others.

Topics: 
General, Law and Civil Liberties