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Monday, November 01, 2021

A solution in WWH (Updated)

That did not go as I expected. If I had to read tea leaves, the Justices seemed inclined to let WWH go forward while allowing US to die on the vine, whether by rejecting the US's theory of the suit or counting on the US to voluntarily go away in deference to the private action. Some thoughts after the jump. I had predicted the opposite, thinking that the "this is a unique law" would justify a unique case by the US, whereas allowing WWH to go forward opens up a new realm of federal constitutional litigation that the Justices are not anticipating.

My theory has been that WWH cannot work because there is no one to sue--no executive enforces and Mark Dickson has not shown an intent to sue. WWH's theory--sue the judges and clerks--does not work because they are not responsible executive officers and they are not adverse to WWH and other providers. But Justice Sotomayor, with Kagan and Breyer weighing, offered something that works (which I had not thought of) without the slippery-slope concerns.

Part of the EPY fiction is that enjoining the attorney general (or whomever the responsible executive officer is) reaches everyone below the AG who enforces the law; an injunction barring the AG from enforcing a criminal law would prohibit a DA from initiating an individual prosecution.* So apply that idea to the deputized private SB8 plaintiffs who act as the equivalent to DAs--enjoin the AG based on his residual enforcement authority and the injunction applies to every individual private enforcer beneath him. The theory requires the additional step (which never came up during argument) of whether and why SB8 plaintiffs act under color of state law, which would have cut through Stone's resistance to the idea that private individuals were agents or deputized. They are not agents or deputies, but they are performing a traditional-and-exclusive public function in enforcing law for the public benefit. Under SB8, private individuals serve the role of individual DAs or other enforcing officers captured in an injunction against the highest responsible state officer.

    [*] Texas SG Judd Stone pushed back on Texas DA's independent authority. Kagan attempted to get at this by asking what would happen if a state enacted a heartbeat ban with ordinary criminal punishment. She never got a good answer. But she (and I) cannot believe that if Texas enacted a law criminalizing all abortions that an injunction prohibiting Greg Abbott from enforcing that law would not be read to prohibit every DA from enforcing the law).

WWH narrowed its theory in its Reply and in the argument, focusing clerks as the real target of the suit and remedy. My guess is they ran from language in EPY saying federal courts cannot enjoin judges from adjudicating, as well as the argument that judges do not enforce and are not adverse to the litigants. Docketing a case is "administrative" in a sense, so it fits better with the idea of stopping enforcement. The problem remains that clerks are no more adverse to the litigants than the judge is. The clerk is a neutral recipient and processor of the lawsuit enabling the (neutral, non-adverse) judge to adjudicate. [Update: Stephen Sachs explains why suing clerks makes no sense, including why the shift from enjoining enforcement of the law to enjoining "commencement" of the suit does not work, because the enforcer and commerncer remains the party bringing suit, not the clerk who puts it in the system).

Sotomayor's new theory works because it does not eviscerate private civil litigation or the state power to decide what laws to enact and how to enforce them. It applies to unique circumstance in which the delegation of exclusive enforcement authority for the benefit of the public renders private state-law plaintiffs state actors/persons acting under color of state law It would not apply to ordinary civil litigation to remedy a personal injury that will be met with a federal constitutional defense. This theory works because the expansion of the injunctive power under  fits the elements of the law being challenged. "Sue the AG to reach the deputized enforcers" can be limited to the extraordinary law that deputizes private plaintiffs to enforce state law--absent deputized enforcers, the theory does not work and so does not affect other lawsuits.

On the other hand, thereis no logical way to limit "sue-the-clerks" to the extraordinary case than by fiat--declaring SB8 (and presumably its imitators) as unique (based on several elements the Court and WWH identified) and creating a Bush v. Gore-good-for-this-trip-only process. Otherwise, the option of suing clerks to avoid the chilling effect of having to litigate defensively in state court logically must be available to any state-court defendant with a constitutional defense. Suing clerks also has serious administrability problems. Clerks ordinarily do not (and cannot) review or analyze lawsuits before docketing them, so an injunction would require them to do something they typically do not do. Moreover, Alito offered the hypothetical of a plaintiff who brings an SB8 claim along with a malpractice or IIED claim; lawyers for WWH said that the clerk could not accept that suit, although it would be under ordinary tort law, with none of the special problems of SB8. This suggests that "sue the clerks" cannot be limited to SB8 claims.

Update: Consider a real-life example, courtesy of Eugene Volokh: There is ongoing debate about whether the right of publicity can exist in light of the First Amendment and the constitutional limits on the scope of that tort. The First Amendment battle is fought defensively--plaintiffs suing for violations of the right of publicity and speakers defending on First Amendment grounds. If the Court allows suits against clerks, any speaker fearing a right-of-publicity claim would take that option rather than waiting for a suit and a defensive posture. The only way to avoid that is for a court to say "SB8 is different," although those differences have nothing to do with the choice between offensive and defensive litigation.

Now we wait, I expect for a few weeks--I believe the Court will decide this before argument in Dobbs on December 1. The question whether the Court takes the smart way to resolve this without blowing up the ordinary rules of constitutional litigation. Sototmayor's question offers a way that is less destructive than allowing EPY actions against clerks and judges.

Posted by Howard Wasserman on November 1, 2021 at 03:18 PM in Civil Procedure, Constitutional thoughts, Howard Wasserman, Judicial Process | Permalink

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