Cato At Liberty

The Supreme Court today came down with opinions in two cases in which Cato filed a brief. First, in Murr v. Wisconsin, it unfortunately ruled against property owners in an important regulatory-takings case. Then, in Lee v. United States, it correctly found that a criminal defendant who had virtually no chance to win at trial—absent jury nullifcation, which was our focus—was still prejudiced by (and entitled to a new trial due to) his counsel’s wrong advice that he wouldn’t be deported if he pled guilty.

Murr: Whenever you see a court invoke a “multifactor balancing test,” you know it’s just making stuff up. Alas that’s what happened in Murr v. Wisconsin, where a family was deprived of significant use of its property—not to mention economic benefits—because of an unfortunate operation of local law. The Supreme Court compounded that harm by essentially deferring to state determinations of property owners’ rights, and did so by applying that “multifactor” standard that allows it to reach whatever result it wants. This ruling shows that in the grander scheme, as Justice Thomas noted in his dissent, the Supreme Court needs to reevaluate its regulatory-takings jurisprudence altogether. (For more, see Cato’s amicus brief.)

Lee: The Court was correct to give even seemingly hopeless criminal defendants the right to adequate legal repreentation. Jae Lee only took a plea deal because his lawyer repeatedly assured him that he wouldn’t face deportation. The fact that going to trial, where he had no legal leg to stand on, would’ve almost certainly resulted in a longer prison sentence is immaterial. It’s clear that for Lee, who was brought to the United States from South Korea as a child, the risk of being forced to leave the only country he knows was much more important than a longer prison sentence. Lurking under this case was the controversial doctrine-that-must-not-be-named of jury nullification, which was essentially Lee’s only chance for acquittal. (For more, see Cato’s amicus brief.)

Stay tuned Monday for the Supreme Court’s final opinions of the term (especially Trinity Lutheran), as well as decisions on whether to take up the travel-ban case, Masterpiece Bakery (vendors for same-sex weddings), and Peruta (Second Amendment right to carry). And maybe, just maybe, Justice Anthony Kennedy will announce his retirement—though if I had to bet, I’d say he sticks around another year.

One of the liberties protected by the Constitution is the right to do business in other states, on the same terms as companies based in those states. That right is enshrined in the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV, section 2, one of the handful of individual rights that the Framers saw fit to safeguard even before the Bill of Rights was enacted. In fact, ensuring the opportunity to do business out-of-state on equal terms with a state’s residents was one of the principal motivations for holding the Constitutional Convention in the first place. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has condoned California’s violation of that right.

California enacted a set of commercial-fishing license fees that require nonresidents to pay several times more than residents. The system is explicitly discriminatory, harshly regressive, and intentionally protectionist. The Supreme Court and the Fourth Circuit, in substantively identical circumstances, have ruled these kinds of provisions to be impermissible: States must charge license fees equally to residents and nonresidents alike, or else bear the burden of justifying their discrimination (which California has made little real effort to do). But an en banc majority of the Ninth Circuit quite literally imposed the opposite rule. Not only did it uphold California’s discrimination, but it supported its holding with guesstimates of tax payments and rough calculations of economic costs that the state itself had never supplied. The result is conflict between two federal circuits and an open door for new methods of discrimination that the Constitution has always forbidden.

Now, a group of fishermen, with amicus support from Cato, is asking the Supreme Court to hear their case and strike down California’s differential commercial fishing license fees. Under the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning, everything California spends on fishery regulation is considered a “subsidy” to that industry—a subsidy paid by resident taxpayers for which the state must be compensated. This framing ignores the fact that nonresident fishermen also pay California sales tax and California income tax for income derived from in-state activities (when their income is enough to qualify for taxation, which it often isn’t) and directly contradicts controlling Supreme Court precedent. This dangerous rationale could otherwise be applied to any number of the nearly one-third of US occupations currently regulated by the states, and if unchecked could contribute significantly to creating just the sort of balkanized national economy that the Constitution was intended to prevent.

The fact of the matter is that California is attempting to protect local business interests at the expense of nonresidents and dress up its blatantly protectionist violation of the Privileges and Immunities Clause in reasonable-sounding language about fairness. The Supreme Court should grant certiorari and remind the Ninth Circuit that this sort of behavior is constitutionally unacceptable.

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that a North Carolina preventing sex offenders from accessing social media and other websites – without any attempt to tailor restrictions to potential contact with minors – violated the First Amendment. But restrictions on the freedom of speech aren’t the only unconstitutional deprivations sex offenders face.

In 1994, Minnesota passed what has become arguably the most aggressive and restrictive sex-offender civil-commitment statute in the country. The Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) provides for the indefinite civil commitment of “sexually dangerous” individuals, over and beyond whatever criminal sentence they may have already completed.

And while there is technically a system in place whereby committed individuals can petition for release or a loosening of their restrictions, in the more than 20 years that the MSOP has existed, only one person has ever been fully discharged (someone in the program for offenses committed as a minor, and he was only discharged after a court challenge). As Craig Bolte, one person committed in the MSOP, has testified, there is a distinct feeling that “the only way to get out is to die.”

The Supreme Court has held that states have the authority to commit individuals against their will outside the traditional criminal justice context, but only for the purpose of keeping genuinely dangerous people off the streets while undergoing rehabilitative treatment. Punishment and deterrence are legitimate goals exclusively of the criminal justice system, so any deprivation of liberty for either of those two purposes must follow only from that system, with all the procedural protections our Constitution requires.

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