Topic: Law and Civil Liberties

When Did Laws Denying Same-Sex Couples Marriage Licenses Become Unconstitutional?

By
Ilya Shapiro

Readers of this blog know that Cato filed a brief in Hollingsworth v. Perry arguing that state prohibitions on same-sex marriage violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  But since when have they done that?  More broadly, to quote a colloquy between Justice Scalia and Ted Olson in the Perry argument:

JUSTICE SCALIA: I’m curious, when -­ when did — when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted? Sometimes — some time after Baker, where we said it didn’t even raise a substantial Federal question? When — when — when did the law become this?

MR. OLSON: When — may I answer this in the form of a rhetorical question? When did it become unconstitutional to prohibit interracial marriages? When did it become unconstitutional to assign children to separate schools.

JUSTICE SCALIA: It’s an easy question, I think, for that one. At — at the time that the Equal Protection Clause was adopted. That’s absolutely true. But don’t give me a question to my question. When do you think it became unconstitutional? Has it always been unconstitutional? …

MR. OLSON: It was constitutional when we -­ as a culture determined that sexual orientation is a characteristic of individuals that they cannot control, and that that -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: I see. When did that happen? When did that happen?

MR. OLSON: There’s no specific date in time. This is an evolutionary cycle.

With due respect to Ted Olson, a former solicitor general who’s argued more cases than I’ve watched, I think he missed the mark on this one.  How do rights spontaneously emerge?  To pick up on one of the above examples, was segregation constitutional in 1900 but then somehow not 50 years later?  No, Plessy v. Ferguson was incorrectly decided in 1896 and Brown v. Board of Education overruled it rather than merely asserting that there was an “evolutionary cycle.”  Justice Scalia himself recognized that state racial discrimination of all kinds became unconsitutional when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, in 1868 – and not at some time in future when each particular instance of it was found to violate that provision.

And so, either it was unconstitutional to exclude same-sex couples from marriage in 1868 or it’s still constitutional to do so.  Josh Blackman and I wrote about doing this “originalism at the right time” in our exegesis of the Privileges or Immunities Clause in the context of the right to keep and bear arms, Keeping Pandora’s Box Sealed.  (Josh later extended that analysis in a short piece on gender equality and sex discrimination.)

Which isn’t to say that what the challengers have to prove here that the drafters or ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment had gay marriage in mind.  But it does mean that you have to look at what “equal protection of the laws” in 1868 and apply that understanding accordingly.  As Elizabeth Wydra, my co-counsel on our Perry brief, wrote on the Constitutional Accountability Center’s blog:

While race was obviously at the forefront of the minds of the Amendment’s drafters – after all, they had just secured an amendment banning slavery in the wake of a brutal civil war–they specifically chose language that would protect against unequal treatment based on more than just racial discrimination, and in fact affirmatively rejected narrower proposals that would prohibit only racial discrimination.

Even so, had Olson given Justice Scalia the answer I have suggested, Scalia surely would have retorted that there was no way the American people were thinking of marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples when they ratified the Amendment. That’s not the point. No originalist – not even Justice Scalia – believes that the plain words of the Constitution apply only in the ways the framers expected. The ruling Justice Scalia announced from the bench just before the start of arguments this morning is a perfect example: just because there weren’t drug-sniffing police dogs in 1791, doesn’t mean their use can’t violate the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, as the Court held today in Florida v. Jardines.

The Constitution guarantees equal protection of the laws to “any person.” In looking to what rights were understood to be protected equally, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment understood state-sanctioned marriage as a personal, individual right that must be made available on an equal basis to all persons. Accordingly, by writing into the Constitution a requirement of equality under the law and equality of basic rights for all persons, which included the right to marry, the Amendment’s framers ensured that discriminatory state laws would not stand in the way of Americans exercising their right to marry the person of their own choosing. Laws that discriminate and deny to members of certain groups, including gays and lesbians, the right to marry the person of one’s choice thus contravene the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.

See also Josh Blackman and Orin Kerr.  And for more on the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause, see my op-ed with CAC’s president, Doug Kendall.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

Oral Argument in Prop 8 Case: Kennedy Is Key but Technical/Non-Decision Likely

By
Ilya Shapiro

To the extent oral argument is a predictor of anything – recall how set the Supreme Court was to strike down Obamacare a year ago – the most likely outcome in Hollingsworth v. Perry is a non-decision of some sort.  Only three justices (Scalia, Kennedy, Alito) seemed willing to find that the Prop 8 proponents had standing to bring the case to the Court and one of those (Kennedy) didn’t seem comfortable either striking down or upholding California ban on gay marriage.  

Indeed, the main thing this argument did was to bring back questions of why the Court took the case in the first place.  Unlike the Defense of Marriage Act case of United States v. Windsor, which will be argued tomorrow, the lower court’s ruling in Perry affected only California’s peculiar circumstances: granting gay marriage (by judicial opinion), then taking it away (by popular vote), and otherwise granting same-sex couples all the rights and benefits of marriage except the word.  The Supreme Court tends to use any excuse available not to hear controversial cases, and this one was chock full of them (as even Ted Olson and David Boies argued in their opposition to the petition for certiorari).

But now we’re left with two most likely scenarios: (1) the “liberal” justices potentially joining Chief Justice Roberts on a ruling that the petitioners lack standing, which would probably vacate the Ninth Circuit ruling but leave the district court’s ruling against Prop 8 in place; or (2) no majority because Justice Kennedy (and perhaps others) would prefer to dismiss the case as improvidently granted (a “DIG” in insider terms), which would leave the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in place – so Prop 8 would also remain struck down, albeit on narrower grounds than in the first scenario.

Or we could have one other intriguing non-decision scenario: The Court sets the case for further briefing and re-argument on any number of potential issues – the factual evidence regarding asserted state interests (e.g., outcomes for children raised by gay couples, the effect of allowing gay marriage on marriage and divorce rates more broadly), the historical meaning of equal protection (see Cato’s brief), or some other real or pretextual reason for kicking this can down the road.  Because if there was agreement on one point this morning – other than that the U.S. government’s argument that states’ only options were granting same-sex marriage or not giving gay couples any rights at all (the logical consequence of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling) – it was that gay marriage is a very new phenomenon that at present takes the Court into “uncharted waters” (to quote Justice Kennedy).  And so the justices may want to let the social science (and public opinion) develop for a while.

But, of course, these concerns – as well as the procedural complications – were present when the Court took the case in December, so why take it in the first place?  It could well be that either the “conservative” or “liberal” justices wanted to force Justice Kennedy’s hand. Well, it was clear today that the gentleman’s not for forcing.

For further analysis, which I’m gratified to see is substantially similar,see Tom Goldstein and Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

Jardines: The Supreme Court Retreats to the Home

By
Jim Harper

The Supreme Court ruled today in Florida v. Jardines that “use of trained police dogs to investigate the home and its immediate surroundings is a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.”

It’s the right result. The Court was divided 5-4, though, and the case shows some of the same fissures around Fourth Amendment doctrine that U.S. v. Jones did last year.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Scalia, won’t clear up the doctrinal debates, which are sure to continue. Instead, it retreats to the home. The specific protection for “houses” in the Fourth Amendment, he wrote:

renders this case a straightforward one. The officers were gathering information in an area belonging to Jardines and immediately surrounding his house—in the curtilage of the house, which we have held enjoys protection as part of the home itself. And they gathered that information by physically entering and occupying the area to engage in conduct not explicitly or implicitly permitted by the homeowner.

Property law gives strangers an implied license to approach a house for the variety of purposes they may have. “But introducing a trained police dog to explore the area around the home in hopes of discovering incriminating evidence is something else. There is no customary invitation to do that.”

Justice Scalia did use the case to answer a question left open by Jones. He emphasized that the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test from Katz v. United States (1967) built upon, and did not supplant, the Fourth Amendment’s foundation in property. He specifically declined to use that test in the holding.

The dissent objected vigorously to the idea that approaching the front door of a home via the walk was a trespass.

“[G]athering evidence—even damning evidence—is a lawful activity that falls within the scope of the license to approach,” Justice Alito wrote. “And when officers walk up to the front door of a house, they are permitted to see, hear, and smell whatever can be detected from a lawful vantage point.”

The dissent also rejected an argument put forward by the concurrence: that the reasonable expectation of privacy test is an alternative ground for the holding.

Yes, Justice Kagan would also have used “reasonable expectations” to decide the case, but her concurrence covers more important ground than that. As she did at oral argument, she fixed on the government’s use of the dog to perceive things that couldn’t otherwise be perceived. That’s what searching is.

“[P]olice officers came to Joelis Jardines’ door with a super-sensitive instrument, which they deployed to detect things inside that they could not perceive unassisted.” And later: “[A] drug-detection dog is a specialized device for discovering objects not in plain view (or plain smell).”

In the Cato Institute’s brief in the case, I emphasized that drug-dog detection was but one form of chromatography, the use of which the court should treat as searching because it “look[s] for or seek[s] out that which is otherwise concealed from view” (quoting Black’s Law Dictionary).

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Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

More from Cato Scholars on the Marriage Cases

By
Walter Olson

This morning the Supreme Court hears oral argument in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Prop 8 case, previewed in this space yesterday and the topic of much past attention at Cato. Over the past 48 hours Cato scholars and friends have been writing up a storm:

  • An editorial in the Wall Street Journal contends that the issue should be left to the political process. In response, Cato constitutional studies director Roger Pilon says the Journal goes fundamentally astray on (among other things) whether the Equal Protection Clause was meant to apply only to some short list of “protected classes,” and whether the Perry and Windsor cases resemble Roe v. Wade (they don’t).
  • At Reason, Cato’s Ilya Shapiro debates Jonathan Adler on whether federalism provides a useful organizing concept for the issue. Plenty of debate on that topic at Volokh Conspiracy.
  • In articles at Hoover’s Defining Ideas and Ricochet, Cato adjunct scholar Richard Epstein explains why he finds originalism in tension with liberty on the issue, and has some advice for Justice Anthony Kennedy.
  • Last chance to register for Cato’s all-star panel tomorrow with former Republican National Committee head Ken Mehlman (NPR profile), Freedom to Marry founder Evan Wolfson (BuzzFeed profile), and Cato’s Ilya Shapiro (AFF profile). You can also watch live online here, and comment on Twitter at hashtag #CatoEvents.
  • I’ve got another roundup at Overlawyered noting tomorrow’s panel and other upcoming events, and summarizing a panel on related issues held at Cato last week; I also note the paradox in one recent poll in which a non-trivial number of participants took the view both that same-sex marriage is a right under the U.S. constitution, and that states should be left to go their own ways on whether to recognize it.
Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

Casket Case Shows Economic Liberty to Be Alive and Well

By
Ilya Shapiro

Last week, the Institute for Justice scored a resounding victory for the right to earn an honest living in an unlikely case that pitted woodworking monks against the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors.  The New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit – where I clerked – ruled in a final, unanimous decision (including one Obama-appointed judge) that Louisiana violated the St. Joseph Abbey monks’ economic liberty when it forbade them from selling the caskets they make to support their religious order.

Significantly, the court ruled that the Constitution doesn’t allow the government to enact laws simply to shield industry cartels from honest competition.  Although IJ was already assured of victory, given that Fifth Circuit had issued a divided preliminary opinion in October, that ruling left open some tricky questions that this latest decision definitively settled.  

Last Wednesday’s ruling makes clear that laws having no purpose but to enrich certain protected interests are unconstitutional, using reasoning that should be a model for courts across the country.  

Louisiana now has 90 days to seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court – which supporters of economic liberty should welcome because IJ’s previous litigation created a split in the federal lower courts that can only be resolved, for the nation as a whole, by the Supreme Court. 

For more on St. Joseph Abbey v. Castille, see IJ’s case page and this Wall Street Journal op-ed by IJ’s Chip Mellor and Jeff Rowes. And if you’re a law student interested in using your legal skills to promote liberty this summer, you should apply to IJ’s epic public interest boot camp (of which I’m a graduate, though in my day there wasn’t any skydiving or aikido).

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties, Regulatory Studies

Three Cheers for Autonomy

By
Trevor Burrus

In today’s New York Times, philosopher Sarah Conly gives “Three Cheers for the Nanny State,” specifically, NYC’s famed big soda ban. Invoking aspects of the theory of “nudge,” made popular in a book by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Conly argues that, sometimes, the government can rightfully save us from ourselves.

The popularity of “nudge theory” is closely tied to the recent spate of popular science books on the foibles of the human brain. Books such as Predictably Irrational and A Mind of Its Own are part of a new self-help fad: the idea that scientists studying the error-prone human brain can help us understand why we are unable to quit smoking, lose weight, and many other common problems.

It was only a matter of time until government regulators and their champions embraced this new science in order to put a fresh spin on an old impulse—their never-ending desire to save us from ourselves. But despite the valid insights of cognitive neuroscience, both nudge theory and Conly’s editorial are no more defensible than any other paternalism. We should not be deceived into believing that there is any new wine in those old wineskins.

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Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties, Regulatory Studies

Still Contemptuous of the Court, TSA Doesn’t Even Try to Justify its Strip-Search Machine Policy

By
Jim Harper

It took the Transportation Security Administration 20 months to comply with a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals order requiring it to issue a justification for its policy of using strip-search machines for primary screening at airports and to begin taking comments from the public.

In that time, it came up with a 53-page (double-spaced) notice of proposed rulemaking. That’s 2.65 double-spaced pages per month.

This may be the most carefully written rulemaking document in history. We’ll be discussing it next week at an event entitled: “Travel Surveillance, Traveler Intrusion.” Register now!

The TSA’s strip-search machine notice will be published in the Federal Register tomorrow, and the public will have 90 days to comment. The law requires the agency to consider those public comments before it finalizes its policies. If the comments reveal the TSA’s policies to be arbitrary or capricious, the policies can be struck down.

But what is there to comment on? The TSA’s brief document defends a hopelessly vague policy statement instead of the articulation that the court asked for. And as to the policy we all know it’s implementing, TSA hides behind the skirts of government secrecy.

When the court found that the TSA was supposed to take comment from the public, it wanted a clearer articulation of what rules apply at the airport. The court’s ruling itself devoted several paragraphs to the policy and how it affects American travelers.

[T]he TSA decided early in 2010 to use the scanners everywhere for primary screening. By the end of that year the TSA was operating 486 scanners at 78 airports; it plans to add 500 more scanners before the end of this year.

No passenger is ever required to submit to an AIT scan. Signs at the security checkpoint notify passengers they may opt instead for a patdown, which the TSA claims is the only effective alternative method of screening passengers. A passenger who does not want to pass through an AIT scanner may ask that the patdown be performed by an officer of the same sex and in private. Many passengers nonetheless remain unaware of this right, and some who have exercised the right have complained that the resulting patdown was unnecessarily aggressive.

The court wanted a rulemaking on this policy. In the jargon of administrative procedure, the court demanded a “legislative rule,” something that reasonably details the rights of the public and what travelers can expect when they go to the airport.

Instead, the TSA has produced a perfectly vague policy statement that conveys nothing about what law applies at the airport. In the regulations that cover screening and inspection, the TSA simply wants to add:

(d) The screening and inspection described in (a) may include the use of advanced imaging technology. For purposes of this section, advanced imaging technology is defined as screening technology used to detect concealed anomalies without requiring physical contact with the individual being screened.

Not a word about the use of strip-search machines as primary screening. Nothing about travelers’ options. Nothing about signage. Nothing about the procedures for opt-outs. Nothing about what a person can do if they have a complaint. It’s not a regulation. It’s a restatement of “we do what we want.”

That’s contemptuous of the court’s order requiring TSA to inform the public, take comments, and consider those comments in formulating a final rule. TSA is doing everything it can to make sure that the airport is a constitution-free zone, and this time it’s lifting a middle finger to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

It is possible, even in a relatively short document, to articulate how billions of dollars spent on exposing the bodies of millions of law-abiding Americans makes the country better off. What’s amazing about the document is how little it says. TSA doesn’t even try to justify its strip-search machine policy. Instead, it plays the govenment secrecy trump card.

Here is everything TSA says about how strip-search machines (or “AIT” for “advanced imaging technology”) make air travel safer:

[R]isk reduction analysis shows that the chance of a successful terrorist attack on aviation targets generally decreases as TSA deploys AIT. However, the results of TSA’s risk-reduction analysis are classified.

Balderdash.

Under Executive Order 135256, classification is permitted if “disclosure of the information reasonably could be expected to result in damage to the national security, which includes defense against transnational terrorism.”

“If there is significant doubt about the need to classify information,” the order continues, “it shall not be classified.”

Assessing the costs and benefits of TSA’s policies cannot possibly result in damage to national security. The reason I know this? It’s already been done, publicly, by Mark G. Stewart of the University of Newcastle, Australia, and John Mueller of the Ohio State University. They published their findings in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management in 2011, and national security is none the worse.

Walking through how well policies and technologies produce security can be done without revealing any intelligence about threats, and it can be done without revealing vulnerabilities in the policy and technology. But the TSA is playing the secrecy trump card, hoping that a gullible and fearful public will simply accept their authority.

I anticipated that the agency might try this tactic when the original order to engage in a public rulemaking came down in mid-2011. In a Cato blog post, I wrote:

Watch in the rulemaking for the TSA to obfuscate, particularly in the area of threat, using claims to secrecy. “We can’t reveal what we know,” goes the argument. “You’ll have to accept our generalizations about the threat being ‘substantial,’ ‘ever-changing,’ and ‘growing.’” It’s an appeal to authority that works with much of the American public, but it is not one to which courts—a co-equal branch of the government—should so easily succumb.

If it sees it as necessary, the TSA should publish its methodology for assessing threats, then create a secret annex to the rulemaking record for court review containing the current state of threat under that methodology, and how the threat environment at the present time compares to threat over a relevant part of the recent past. A document that contains anecdotal evidence of threat is not a threat methodology. Only a way of thinking about threat that can be (and is) methodically applied over time is a methodology.

The TSA published nothing, and it hopes to get past the public and the courts with that.

Its inappropriate and undeniably overbroad use of secrecy will be in our comments to the agency and the legal appeal that will almost certainly follow.

Crucially, agency actions like this are subject to court review. When the TSA finalizes its rules, a court will “decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action.” Sooner or later, we’ll talk about whether TSA followed the court’s order, the lawfulness of wrapping its decision-making in secrecy, and the arbitrary nature of a policy that has no public justification.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

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