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Saturday, September 02, 2023

Fugitive abortion seekers

The Washington Post reports on the latest exclusive-private-enforcement efforts from Mark Lee Dickson and Jonathan Mitchell--county and city ordinances prohibiting the use of local roads to obtain a legal out-of-state abortion, enforced through private lawsuits. I have questions.

How does private enforcement work here and how does a plaintiff have the basic information to bring suit? How can a plaintiff know what roads someone took to leave the state? Is he going to follow the woman and her driver through town (and when does that become stalking)? Are they given interdiction authority to find out where someone is heading (which strengthens the argument that "any person" acts under color)? Will local law enforcement help (which provides a target to sue in an offensive pre-enforcement action)? How can a plaintiff know they took these roads on the "abortion trip" as opposed to some other time. What constitutes one trip and how do you identify the purpose of that trip--if a person drives on those roads on Monday but does not leave the state for the procedure until Wednesday, has she used the roads to obtain the abortion?

The hard part for rights-holders facing these laws is creating litigation and the opportunity to challenge the law as a defense. Anti-choice activists do not want to sue, because they do not want to provide that opportunity, since the law is clearly constitutionally invalid. Someone needs to be Estelle Griswold. A friendly plaintiff action should be easy heree--"any person" includes anyone anywhere who knows the route a woman took out of state, including any person who supports abortion rights. Or how about a caravan of cars driving through town at once, daring someone in town to sue. Again, it takes time. But these ordinances seem to impose less of a chill than S.B. 8 did.

These private-enforcement laws (what Jon Michaels and David Noll call "vigilante federalism" and "subordination regimes") have, thus far, remained the province of red states. Despite suggestions about the rights blue states could target (something Rocky and I look at in a potential new paper), only California has done something, a half-hearted regulation of ghost guns and assault weapons. This story reminds of another feature of performative cultural-war legislation--the divide between states and municipalities. Red states (notably Florida and Texas, of course) use state law to override the local laws and policies of blue municipalities within the state--Ron DeSantis suspended two elected Democratic states attorneys; Florida's various anti-woke laws aim to override local school-board policies; Texas has stripped cities of the power to establish immigrant sanctuary cities. The Post article mentions blue-state conservative cities near a red-state border (for example, New Mexico cities near the Texas border or Illinois cities near the Missouri border) prohibiting abortion clinics from operating there, thus eliminating a destination for out-of-staters seeking services. Yet Democratic state governments have not taken similar steps to strip municipalities of their local power.

Posted by Howard Wasserman on September 2, 2023 at 02:31 PM in Civil Procedure, Constitutional thoughts, Howard Wasserman, Judicial Process | Permalink

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