Rethinking Younger

Interesting Younger case from the 11th Circuit. The Georgia AG pursued a state administrative action against a PAC associated with Stacey Abrams for failing to register and file various reports. The state commission found reasonable grounds and referred the case to the AG, which referred the matter to the state administrative hearing body. Between those events, the PACs filed a § 1983 action to enjoin the state proceedings. The court held that the district court should have abstained from the federal action.

Judge Newsom wrote another Fed Courts treatise for the panel. Although the PACs filed the federal action before the hearing body received the referral to commence its proceeding, the court applied the piece of Younger under which the court must abstain if the state proceeding commences after the federal proceeding but before any "proceedings of substance on the merits have taken place in federal court." The plaintiffs had filed a complaint and a motion for a preliminary injunction and the court had handled some case-management motions. But the court had not ruled on the PI motion or otherwise engaged with the merits in the few weeks before the state proceeding commenced.* And the fact that the state conducted a thorough multi-year investigation of the PACs undermined the suggestion that the case falls within the bad-faith exception.

[*] The court rejected the district court's reliance on its "experience managing cases" in defining the point at which the state action is too late.

Judge Rosenbaum concurs to call on the courts to "reconsider just how far Younger should extend." Rosenbaum fears Younger in a case involving core political and electoral speech; that speech has achieved greater protection than it had at the time of Younger. Whatever the merits of abstention in 1970s actions involving communists, nude dancing, and "Deep Throat" (speech which the Burger Court was backing away from protecting), Citizens United and other recent campaign-finance cases vault such speech into a unique First Amendment core demanding the "strongest protection." (A cute rhetorical move in a case in which a Republican AG was going after a Democratic PAC). She complains that two of the Middlesex factors--state interest and adequate opportunity to raise federal issues--invariably favor abstention and the exceptions are too narrow to offer help. This imposes an exhaustion requirement for those wishing to engage in core political speech during and around an election. And she identifies the "Goldilocks" problem in Younger--plaintiffs must hit the sweet spot between state enforcement being sufficiently imminent to warrant standing but before that state enforcement has begun.

Recent criticisms of Younger--especially in the work of Fred Smith (Emory)--focus on efforts to challenge proceedings within the criminal justice system, such as bail or the corrupt mess in municipal courts in Ferguson and elsewhere. The argument is that federal courts should not defer to broken state systems that the federal action challenges. Rosenbaum focuses on one area of substantive law that abstention disparately effects, in a way that undermines the substantive purposes of that law.