Tag: Stevens

A Few More Points on McDonald

By
Ilya Shapiro

I still haven’t finished reading the full 214-page opinion, but a few points to add to the statement I made yesterday:

  • Justice Alito’s plurality opinion, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia and Kennedy, is a tight 45-page discussion of the history of the right to keep and bear arms and how it relates to the Court’s “incorporation” doctrine under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.  No excess verbiage, no policy arguments, and, notably, no denial or disparagement of the Privileges or Immunities Clause – just denying to take up the issue in light of the long line of Substantive Due Process incorporation.
  • Justice Thomas provides a magisterial 56-page defense of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, resurrecting a long-beleaguered constitutional provision.  While he doesn’t cite Keeping Pandora’s Box Sealed, Josh Blackman and I are proud to have tracked quite closely the arguments Thomas makes.  Note that without Thomas’s vote, there is no majority extending the right to keep and bear arms to the states.  That means P or I is relevant and enters the casebooks and Court precedent.
  • The dissents by Justices Stevens and Breyer, respectively (the latter joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor), rest almost exclusively on pragmatic arguments.  They seem to think that the right to keep and bear arms is an inconvenient part of the Constitution in our modern (particularly urban) age.  This may or may not be correct as a matter of policy or social science – the evidence I’ve seen seems to point against them – but it’s irrelevant to the legal analysis.  If the dissenting justices wish to propose a constitutional amendment, I would welcome the ensuing debate.  As it stands, however, their arguments are disturbingly devoid of principled constitutional interpretation.  Note also that neither dissent goes into privileges or immunities analysis, though Justice Stevens argues that the Clause’s meaning is “not as clear” as the petitioners (our side) suggest.
  • Relatedly, both Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer invoke but misunderstand the infamous Footnote Four of the 1937 Carolene Products case, which bifurcated our rights, privileging political rights over economic liberties and property rights and deferring to the legislative branches when at all possible.  One of the points Footnote Four made, however, was that enumerated rights have to have the strongest possible constitutional protection: “There may be narrower scope for operation of the presumption of constitutionality when legislation appears on its face to be within a specific prohibition of the Constitution, such as those of the first ten amendments, which are deemed equally specific when held to be embraced within the Fourteenth.”  The Second Amendment, then, if anything has to have at least as much protection as the right to privacy and other unenumerated rights.
  • Finally, it is startling that not only does a fundamental constitutional right hang by a one-vote thread, but its application to the states is similarly tenuous.  There but for the grace of God goes any right – and any limitation on government power.  As I said yesterday, “Thank God that vote is Justice Thomas’s.”

For more McDonald reaction, see Josh Blackman’s remarkable series of blogposts.

Topics: 
General, Law and Civil Liberties

The Use and Misuse of Foreign Law in U.S. Courts

By
Ilya Shapiro

On Tuesday I discussed the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down laws that allow juveniles to be sentenced to life without parole (LWOP) for non-homicide crimes.  What concerns me here isn’t so much the morality or policy wisdom in applying such sentences – though Chief Justice Roberts makes some good policy points in his concurrence – or even the interpretation of what constitutes a “cruel and unusual punishment” – which I think Justice Kennedy mishandles in a confusing discussion of national consensuses. 

No, the most troubling part of that case was the unfortunate reference to foreign authorities to support the Court’s interpretation of the Eighth Amendment.  Justice Kennedy notes that juvenile LWOP has been “rejected the world over.”  “The judgment of the world’s nations that a particular sentencing practice is inconsistent with basic principles of decency,” he writes, “demonstrates that the court’s rationale has respected reasoning to support it.”

Justice Thomas, in his dissent, disputes Justice Kennedy’s math, noting that 11 countries allow the punishment. More importantly, “foreign laws and sentencing practices” are “irrelevant to the meaning of our Constitution.”  He adds that most democracies around the world remain free to adopt the punishment should they wish to. “Starting today,” Thomas concludes, “ours can count itself among the few in which judicial decree prevents voters from making that choice.”

And that’s the crux of the matter: citing foreign law, using it to support a given reading of domestic law undermines democratic self-governance.  The interpretation of the U.S. Constitution should depend on that document’s text, structure, and history, what it means in the context of the American polity.  Even if a judge cares about ”evolving standards of decency” or invokes the “living Constitution,” it should be the updated standards in America that matter, or the opinions and values of modern Americans. 

That is, federal judges derive their powers from the Constitution, which is a wholly American document.  To the extent they use foreign extrinsic evidence to interpret this document, they are engaging in something – comparative law? social science? – that is not judging.  It’s not a matter of being closed-minded or provincial – I actually enjoy reading comparative political research, and think our legislators and constitutional draftsmen engage in malpractice if they don’t use it – but, as Justice Thomas describes in Graham, the judicial role is different than the legislative or academic one.

Now, in practice U.S. courts actually rarely cite foreign law, and most of the time when they do it’s not controversial. For example, it’s relevant to see how all the contracting parties interpret a treaty, because you want a treaty (a contract among nations) to be understood the same way everywhere. Similarly, foreign court pronouncements are relevant to interpreting customary international law – the law of nations as the Framers understood it – to the limited extent it applies to a given case (crime on the high seas and the like). Next we have the coordination of litigation, with international companies suing each other based on contracts that specify that “X” provision is subject to British law whereas “Y” deals with Hong Kong law, and that the arbitration forum is supposed to be Switzerland: here the citation of foreign law is absolutely appropriate. Another appropriate use is in conflict of laws analysis: figuring out which law applies and sometimes even applying foreign law as binding in a dispute.

But using foreign law to interpret domestic law, and especially the Constitution, is problematic – but the Supreme Court does it more than lower courts, particularly in high profile cases: those involving the culture wars, moral issues like the death penalty and abortion, and other charged cases like affirmative action and sex discrimination.  Libertarians should not welcome this trend because it signals judging based on something other than the principled reading of our own laws – in short, judicial usurpation of the policy-making function.

Hans Bader of CEI provides a longer write-up of Graham, and here again is Cato’s brief. For a pithy critique of the improper use of foreign law by U.S. courts, see Richard Posner’s now-famous article in Legal Affairs.  And for an in-depth and entertaining exploration of these issues, read or watch a debate Justices Scalia and Breyer had in 2005.

Coincidentally, the same day the Court issued both Graham and Comstock (which I discuss here), it also decided an important case, Abbott v. Abbott, that uses foreign law to interpret an international treaty on child abduction.  (While I haven’t yet gone through the Abbott decision, both the majority and dissent are correct to use foreign law to help them reach their conclusions.)

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

Crocodile Tears? Liberals Lament Lack of Their Own on the Court

By
Ilya Shapiro

An interesting narrative has arisen among some on the left that the nomination of Elena Kagan shows what chumps Democratic presidents are.  That is, not only could President Obama have tapped a stronger “progressive” voice, but he – like President Clinton before him, and unlike Republican presidents – put avoiding political fights ahead of moving the Court left.  Since LBJ, Democrats have opted for a “moderate technocrat” like Stephen Breyer rather than a “lion” like William Brennan or Thurgood Marshall.  (Sonia Sotomayor was good and necessary for identity politics, the argument continues, but, let’s face it, she’s no liberal Scalia.)

Take this opening quote from a New York Times article that came out the day of the nominee’s announcement: “The selection of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to be the nation’s 112th justice extends a quarter-century pattern in which Republican presidents generally install strong conservatives on the Supreme Court while Democratic presidents pick candidates who often disappoint their liberal base.”  Or Dahlia Lithwick’s op-ed in Slate about how liberal law students are so many lost sheep because their ideological heroes are deemed unconfirmable and therefore not part of the nomination discussion.

Well.  A few things on this: First, even if the argument were true, it’s simply not statistically significant because we’re only talking four Democratic appointments (Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Clinton, Sotomayor and Kagan by Obama; poor Jimmy Carter had none, the same number George W. Bush would have had had he not been re-elected).  Second, if you line up the Republican and Democratic nominees in recent decades, it’s conservatives who are disappointed (need I even mention John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter, let alone Earl Warren and Brennan himself, all Republican nominees).  Third, to say that someone like Ginsburg – a push-the-envelope feminist and ACLU lawyer – is a moderate is to center the jurisprudential spectrum around the law faculty lounge.  And fourth, as David Bernstein details, it is people like Richard Epstein – and other Federalist Society regulars like Dan Troy, Miguel Estrada, John Eastman, Frank Easterbrook, Stephen Bainbridge, and Todd Zywicki (as well as Cato’s own Roger Pilon, Randy Barnett, and Ilya Somin) – who would be considered filibusteringly beyond the pale, much more than Lithwick’s vaunted American Constitution Society stalwarts.

In short, if anything it is Republicans who can rightfully be disappointed in their presidents’ nominees – though Kennedy’s seat was of course originally to have been filled by Robert Bork. More unfortunately, it is libertarian law students who can lament that their kind lacks representation on the High Court – though note that the second choice for Kennedy’s seat was Douglas Ginsburg (the last judicial martyr of the drug war).  And so, as the Court remains securely to the left of the American people, just today ratifying radical assertions of federal legislative and judicial power, Elena Kagan is poised to fit right into that jurisprudential “mainstream.”  Good for the left, bad for the Constitution.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

Kagan Nomination Launches Constitutional Debate

By
Ilya Shapiro

As expected, and despite an exhaustive review of shortlist candidates, dead-end leaks about Hillary Clinton, and other distractions, President Obama settled on the long-time prohibitive favorite to be his next Supreme Court nominee.  Elena Kagan became the justice-in-waiting the moment Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed, so you didn’t have to be Tom Goldstein to have predicted this.  The president wanted a highly credentialed non-judge who would serve for a long time and wouldn’t cost too much political capital.  He got a 50-year-old solicitor general and former dean of Harvard Law School – the first female in each post – whose record the Senate (and media, and activists) already examined in a confirmation process that put her into her current post.  That her appointment would put three women on the high court for the first time also doesn’t hurt.

Kagan is certainly not the worst possible nominee from among those in the potential pool – that would’ve been Harold Koh, had President Obama been most inclined to appoint the first Asian-American justice – but others would have been better in various ways.  Although all Democratic nominees would be expected to have similar views on hot-button “culture war” issues like abortion, gay rights and gun control, Diane Wood is a renowned expert on antitrust and complex commercial litigation, for example, and Merrick Garland would almost certainly bring a stronger understanding of administrative law.  Although some on the left are concerned that replacing Justice John Paul Stevens with Kagan “moves the Court to the right,” there is no indication that the solicitor general is anything but a standard modern liberal, with all the unfortunate views that entails on the scope of federal power.  Another concern is her mediocre performance in her current position – the choices of which legal arguments to make from those available to her in defending federal laws in Citizens United and United States v. Stevens, for example, were not strategically sound – though she may well be better suited to a judicial rather than advocacy role.

In any event, with Democrats still holding a 59-seat Senate majority, Elena Kagan’s confirmation is in no doubt whatsoever.  The more interesting aspect of the next couple of months, culminating in hearings before the Judiciary Committee, will be the debate over the meaning of the Constitution and what limits there are to government action.  In an election year when a highly unpopular and patently unconstitutional health care “reform” was rammed through Congress using every procedural gimmick imaginable, voters are more sensitive to constitutional discourse now than they have been in decades.  From bailing out the financial and auto industries to fining every man, woman and child who doesn’t buy a government-approved health insurance policy – and, coming soon, regulating carbon emissions – the Obama administration is taking over civil society at a rate that alarms Americans and fuels both Tea Party populism and interest in libertarian policy solutions (which Cato is happy to offer but wishes were implemented on the front end instead of being invoked as a response to destructive statism).  The Kagan nomination is the perfect vehicle for a public airing of these important issues.

Senators should thus ask questions about the meaning of the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and the General Welfare Clause, to name but three provisions under which courts have ratified incredible assertions of federal power divorced from those the Constitution discretely enumerates.  If Elena Kagan refuses to answer such queries substantively – employing the usual dodge that she may be called upon to interpret these clauses as justice – we can rightfully hold that response against her, as she herself counseled in a law review article 15 years ago.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

Court Ruling Is About Free Speech, Not Animal Cruelty

By
Ilya Shapiro

As expected from the oral argument in U.S. v. Stevens last fall - when Justice Alito was alone in expressing some support for the government’s position - the Court on Tuesday upheld the First Amendment by declining to add a category of unprotected speech. This was not, after all, a case about the “human sacrifice channel” or Michael Vick’s greatest dog fights. Indeed, cruelty to animals should be and is punished everywhere in the country. Instead, at issue here was a broadly drawn “depiction of animal cruelty” statute that could have ensnared Spanish tourism brochures or hunting instructional videos. More fundamentally, the Court rightly rejected the government’s proposed weighing of the “value” of speech against its “social cost.” That’s simply not the way Americans view the First Amendment.

The case is also notable because a solid majority of the Court rejected the “speech balancing test” defended by Solicitor General Elena Kagan, often mentioned as being on the short list of candidates to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.  Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion, joined by all of the panel’s liberal justices, went so far as to call that argument by Kagan “startling and dangerous.”  That is the kind of legal reproach that tends to be revisited at confirmation hearings.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

Due Process Case to be Decided on Procedural Grounds

By
Ilya Shapiro

Yesterday I went to the Supreme Court to watch the argument in Alvarez v. Smith, a case about civil forfeiture in which Cato filed an amicus brief. 

Civil forfeiture, the practice in which the police seize cars, money and other kinds of property that they say has some connection to crime, can raise various of legal and policy issues – from property rights to due process.  The question in Alvarez is the basic one of whether people seeking to get their property back are entitled to a prompt hearing before a judge. 

Illinois’ forfeiture law allows the State to wait as long as six months before having to prove the legitimacy of the seizure, which proceeding may then be delayed indefinitely for “good cause.” The six plaintiffs in Alvarez — three of whom were never charged with a crime — had their cars or money seized without a warrant for months or years without any judicial hearing, and sued the state and city authorities for violating their rights to due process. The Seventh Circuit found the Illinois law to be unconstitutional because of the delay between the seizure and the forfeiture proceeding and ruled that the plaintiffs must be afforded an informal hearing to determine whether there is probable cause to detain the property. The Supreme Court agreed to review the case at the request of the Cook County State Attorney.

Cato’s brief, joined by the Goldwater Institute and Reason Foundation, supports the individuals whose property was seized. Written by David B. Smith, who previously supervised all forfeiture litigation for the Department of Justice and is now the nation’s leading authority on civil and criminal forfeiture, the brief makes three arguments: 1) Because the Illinois law, unlike the federal Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000, is stacked in favor of law enforcement agencies and lacks protections for innocent property owners, the Court should apply the due process analysis from Mathews v. Eldridge, rather than the more lenient test the State proposes; 2) What has become known as a Krimstock hearing has proven to be an effective and not overly burdensome means of preventing government delay and a meaningful opportunity to contest seizure; and 3) the State’s comparison of the time limits in CAFRA with those in its own law is misleading.

Unfortunately, though some justices appeared at argument inclined to rule that at least some prompt process was due – many other states require that the police quickly come before a judge to make a showing equivalent to the one necessary to get a search warrant – several seemed to want to avoid the due process question for another day because Alvarez was procedurally flawed, so to speak.  That is, Justice Scalia pointed that none of the six plaintiffs have a live claim any more – three have had their cars returned, two defaulted on their claims, and the State reached agreement with one – so the case was “moot.”  And Justice Stevens noted that the appellate court left it to the trial court to determine the details of the hearing to which the plaintiffs were entitled.  (Of course, if the latter “problem” ends up being the key to the case, the Court will simply dismiss the appeal and let the Seventh Circuit’s ruling stand, which is good news – but only for people in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.)

For more on the case, see George Mason law professor and Cato adjunct scholar Ilya Somin’s oped, and his related blog post at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties