‘The Supreme Court shall permit television coverage of all open sessions of the Court unless the Court decides, by a vote of the majority of justices, that allowing such coverage in a particular case would constitute a violation of the due process rights of 1 or more of the parties before the Court.”

Two questions.

(1) This seems badly drafted to me. What does “television coverage” mean for the purposes of this bill? Does it mean that the camera gets to swivel between Justices and the attorney?  That it can face the wall?  But more interestingly,

(2) What ifthe [...]]]> It’s been widely reported that SB.1945, if passed, would compel the Supreme Court to televise its proceedings. Here’s the relevant bill text:

‘The Supreme Court shall permit television coverage of all open sessions of the Court unless the Court decides, by a vote of the majority of justices, that allowing such coverage in a particular case would constitute a violation of the due process rights of 1 or more of the parties before the Court.”

Two questions.

(1) This seems badly drafted to me. What does “television coverage” mean for the purposes of this bill? Does it mean that the camera gets to swivel between Justices and the attorney?  That it can face the wall?  But more interestingly,

(2) What ifthe Supreme Court just says no?  The Marshall of the court reports to the Chief, not to the President or the Congress. What is the Coult were simply to decide, as a body, that it didn’t feel bound by another branch’s wishes on how to conduct its proceedings? Obviously, this would never actually happen. But imagine a different case, where the Congress prescribed wig-wearing?  Or how long arguments would last?  Or brief length or content? I recall a Larry Tribe con law exam in which the Congress wrote a law the required the court to decide its constitutionality in a matter of days.  That struck me as unlikely to survive scrutiny.  Similarly here, there’s a plausible separation of powers argument that the Congress doesn’t have the right to tell the Court how to run its house.  That’s precisely what Mike Dorf argued in this column, and it’s surprising to me that so few mainstream journalists have picked up the objection. (But see this Scotusblog discussion.)  Basically, if I were the Court and I didn’t want to be on TV, I’d consider telling Congress to go pound sand.  They don’t have an army either.

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published an Essay by William B. Gould IV entitled The 2011 Basketball Lockout: The Union Lives to Fight Another Day—Just Barely. Gould, a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, provides a succinct postmortem on the 2011 lockout:

The backdrop for the 2011 negotiations was the economic weapon once regarded as a dirty word in the lexicon of American labor-management relations—the lockout. This economic weaponry, endorsed by the Supreme Court since 1965, became the flavor of the two prior decades; baseball flirted with it in 1990, basketball in 1995 and 1999. One of hockey’s lockouts even resulted in the cancellation of the entire 2004-05 season. The lockout again was utilized in 2011 by recently peaceable football as well [...]]]>

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published an Essay by William B. Gould IV entitled The 2011 Basketball Lockout: The Union Lives to Fight Another Day—Just Barely. Gould, a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, provides a succinct postmortem on the 2011 lockout:

The backdrop for the 2011 negotiations was the economic weapon once regarded as a dirty word in the lexicon of American labor-management relations—the lockout. This economic weaponry, endorsed by the Supreme Court since 1965, became the flavor of the two prior decades; baseball flirted with it in 1990, basketball in 1995 and 1999. One of hockey’s lockouts even resulted in the cancellation of the entire 2004-05 season. The lockout again was utilized in 2011 by recently peaceable football as well as by basketball. The owners gravitated towards the lockout tactic because in the event of strike (protesting changes in conditions in employment, which proved ineffective), players who crossed the union picket line could play and still sue in antitrust simultaneously. The lockout put more pressure on the players to settle. . . . The union now was represented by David Boies, who had only a few months before represented the NFL and successfully deprived that union of its only effective antitrust remedy—i.e., an injunction against the lockout, which would have required the owners to open the camps in early summer. Thus the basketball union now would not pursue the injunction remedy, notwithstanding the persuasiveness of Judge Bye’s dissenting opinion in the football case. Of course, Boies would have met himself coming around the corner if he argued for it in basketball.

He concludes:

Nonetheless, even though the union was stripped of its most effective antitrust remedy, litigation seems to have moved the parties together. It most certainly called the NBA’s bluff, in that the league’s regressive or inferior option was quickly forgotten. True, the NBA obtained givebacks that are estimated to be worth more than $300 million. Not only did it win on revenue sharing with the players—the players will possess between 49% and 51% as opposed to 57%—but more stringent luxury tax penalties for violators also have been instituted. As National Basketball Players Association Executive Director Billy Hunter said, the latter element constitutes the “harshest element of the new system.” At the same time, guaranteed contracts were preserved, restricted free agents will benefit from the reduction of the so-called “match period” when teams may match competing offers from seven to three days, which may encourage bidding on these players. The cap remains soft in that the so-called incumbent “Bird” players (named for Celtics superstar Larry Bird) may exceed the cap and have more expansive increases and lengths of contracts than other players. A so-called “amnesty” for bad contracts was permitted, in that even though the contracts must be paid, a player on each club may be waived and his salary not counted towards his team’s cap. What appeared to be a rout of the players in November emerged as a reasonable face-saving compromise.

Read the full article, The 2011 Basketball Lockout: The Union Lives to Fight Another Day—Just Barely by William B. Gould IV, at the Stanford Law Review Online.

Note: Updated quotation.

Scalia’s theory is basically Katz (reasonable expectation of privacy) plus trespass. For Scalia, the conduct in Jones – law enforcement attaching a GPS transmitter to Jones’s car, and then tracking its movements – is a search because “The Government physically occupied [...]]]> The Supreme Court handed down its decision in U.S. v. Jones yesterday, and the blogosphere is abuzz about the case. (See Margot Kaminski, Paul Ohm, Howard Wasserman, Tom Goldstein, and the terrifyingly prolific Orin Kerr.) The verdict was a clean sweep – 9-0 for Jones – but the case produced three opinions, including a duel between Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito. Thus far, most privacy and constitutional law thinkers favor Alito’s position. That’s incorrect: Justice Scalia’s opinion is far more privacy protective. Here’s why:

Scalia’s theory is basically Katz (reasonable expectation of privacy) plus trespass. For Scalia, the conduct in Jones – law enforcement attaching a GPS transmitter to Jones’s car, and then tracking its movements – is a search because “The Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information.” But, that’s not quite precise enough: the key is that the government must “physically intrud[e] on a constitutionally protected area.” (emphasis mine) The tricky part, naturally, is deciding what counts as such an area. Scalia disposes of Oliver (the open fields case) by emphasizing that a field “is not one of those protected areas enumerated in the Fourth Amendment.” Katz is still around for “Situations involving merely the transmission of electronic signals without trespass.”

Scalia thus wants to create magic places: spots where any governmental intrusion, with any physicality, is a search. The home is certainly such a place (see Kyllo) – Jane Yakowitz pointed out to me that this has to explain why the Court took cert in Florida v. Jardines, when we already have Caballes and Place on the books. Determining which places are magic is hard. It’s here that Scalia’s originalism does its work: Scalia wants to apply the understanding and expectations from 1791 to sort places into protected/magic and unprotected.

Alito thinks this is rubbish: his footnote 3 openly makes fun of Scalia’s contention that we can analogize the Jones facts to a constable hiding in a coach (“this would have required either a gigantic coach, a very tiny constable, or both”). His method would instead simply apply the Katz reasonable expectation of privacy test, which he rightly points out is more consonant with the Court’s jurisprudence since its rejection of the physical trespass test set out in Olmstead. This approach looks analytically cleaner, although Alito forthrightly acknowledges the circularity inherent in the reasonable expectations test – expectations derive from the law, in addition to driving it. And, of course, there is the one-way ratchet worry: the government can reduce our reasonable expectations of privacy by abusing our privacy.

Alito, though, proceeds to mess up a previously tidy picture by inventing two new considerations for Fourth Amendment analysis: the duration of the information-gathering (such as GPS tracking), and the severity of the crime. Scalia rightly smacks Alito around for this, as he fails to ground this analysis in anything remotely resembling precedent. At best, this is judicial activism, and at worst, it’s an invitation for a wave of new cases where the government tests boundaries and magnifies the threat posed by those surveilled.

I like Scalia’s approach much better. It sets out clearly that there are some spaces that get heightened privacy protection: we don’t have to engage in the weighing involved in the reasonable expectations test, so it’s cheaper, and there won’t be instances where judges decide that in fact society is willing to permit certain observations in the home, for example. Scalia’s approach is a firewall: it offers a redoubt for privacy. And, it maintains the viability of Katz in other instances. Alito’s two additional considerations point towards the worry that makes me prefer Scalia. Imagine observation of the interior of a home – say, using tiny drones – that would clearly constitute a search under the magic places theory. If the observation is fairly short, or if the crime involved is serious (drug smuggling, terrorism, child pornography), Alito’s analysis would find that there isn’t a search, and hence no need for a warrant. Scalia’s approach always forces the cops to get a warrant. That reassures me.

There are two issues that neither Alito nor Scalia deals with, although to her credit Justice Sonia Sotomayor tackles both: pervasive surveillance, and cloud computing. Pervasive surveillance involves the government’s increasing capabilities to deploy low-cost observation technology – everything from traffic cameras to facial recognition technology – and to store, index, and analyze the resulting torrent of data. Cloud computing involves the shift from maintaining information on devices we control to storing it on devices controlled by Google or Apple or Amazon. The former presents the mosaic theory that the D.C. Circuit endorsed in its opinion in Jones. The latter invites us to re-visit the third party doctrine, whereby one loses any reasonable expectation of privacy if one turns over data to someone else (unless that someone is, say, a priest or lawyer). One failing of the two major opinions in Jones is that they fail to provide any guide for how the Court thinks about these issues – other than to hope mightily that Congress will take care of it for them.

I like Scalia’s hybrid with its magic places. What our privacy rights are when we venture outside the castle walls is a topic the court reserves for another day.

Cross-posted at Info/Law.

There was exciting news from the Supreme Court yesterday.  By a rare 9-0 vote, in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, the Court held that the Government should have obtained a warrant before placing a GPS surveillance device on the defendant’s car and monitoring his movements.  This result was not completely unexpected, especially considering the Justices’ interest at oral argument in the Government’s position that GPS surveillance technology could be used without a warrant to track the movements of any car — even the Justices’ own cars — for an unlimited period of time.  The Government argued —  unsuccessfully — that this result was compelled because citizens have no privacy interests in their [...]]]> By Priscilla Smith, Nabiha Syed & Albert Wong, Information Society Project at Yale Law School

There was exciting news from the Supreme Court yesterday.  By a rare 9-0 vote, in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, the Court held that the Government should have obtained a warrant before placing a GPS surveillance device on the defendant’s car and monitoring his movements.  This result was not completely unexpected, especially considering the Justices’ interest at oral argument in the Government’s position that GPS surveillance technology could be used without a warrant to track the movements of any car — even the Justices’ own cars — for an unlimited period of time.  The Government argued —  unsuccessfully — that this result was compelled because citizens have no privacy interests in their public movements.

Of particular note, the three opinions in the case and the unusual line-up make for a broader ruling than is apparent at the outset.  The most narrow rule comes from the Court’s opinion written by Justice Scalia and joined by Justices Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and — wait for it — Sotomayor, holding that that “the Government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle,² and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a “search.”  Slip op. at 3.  Scalia notes that the Fourth Amendment protects the “right of the people to be secure in their . . . effects,” and it “is beyond dispute that a vehicle is an ‘effect’ as that term is used in the [Fourth] Amendment.”  Id. at 3.  Ergo, he holds the installation done with the intent to “use … th[e] device to monitor the vehicle’s movements” was a search.  Id. at 3.  He describes the action at issue, saying “[t]he Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information.”  He holds that since this form of physical trespass and monitoring would have been a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment at the time it was adopted, it is a search now.  Hello, original application guy.

On first glance, it seems that Scalia might be returning to old interpretations of the Fourth Amendment that required a physical trespass to have occurred before an action could be considered a search.  But what Scalia is actually doing here is defining the Court’s task, which is “at a minimum, is to decide whether the action in question would have constituted a ‘search’ within the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment,” and because it would have, it is a search now.  Just because in 1967 Katz said that the Fourth Amendment protects more than physical trespass, doesn’t mean that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect physical trespass.  See slip op. at 6-7 (noting Katz did not erode the principle that a search occurs where the Government “does engage in physical intrusion of a constitutionally protected area in order to obtain information.”) (emphasis in original).  So Scalia establishes and emphasizes a threshold for determining when a search has occurred — a threshold that is not comprehensive, but sufficient to resolve the issue at hand.

And thus Scalia declines to go further and consider what would happen if, hypothetically, there was no physical trespass.  He does hold open the possibility that “achieving the same result through electronic means [as they achieved here with physical trespass], without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.”  Id. at 11.  Simple enough.  Why decide the harder issue with all its accompanying “vexing problems” that would arise in a case involving electronic surveillance without an accompanying trespass?  Scalia argues that there is no reason to “rush forward” to resolve them now.  Slip op. at 12.  Put aside for a minute that he encouraged the Court in United States v. Kyllo, a case holding that the use of heat-seeking technology required a warrant, to adopt rules that “take account of more sophisticated systems that are already in use or in development,” Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 37.

But Scalia has a problem.  As he points out, in its opinion in United States v. Knotts, the Court upheld the use of beeper technology to track a target’s movements, holding there was no invasion of privacy.  He distinguishes Knotts from this case because Knotts did not involve physical trespass. The beeper there was placed inside a container with consent of the then-owner of the container, and only then was the container placed in the driver’s car.  Moreover, Knotts didn’t challenge the installation.  Right.  But the Court didn’t decide there was no search in Knotts based on an absence of a physical trespass; the Court decided the case holding there was no invasion of privacy.  So shouldn’t Scalia explain to us why he holds open the possibility that “achieving the same result through electronic means [as they achieved here with physical trespass], without an accompanying trespass, [like they did in Knotts] is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy?”  Id. at 11.  Saying that GPS is a different technology, as he does in a footnote, is not enough.  Doesn’t he owe us an explanation of why Knotts doesn’t preclude that possibility, as the Government so vehemently argued it did and the Ninth Circuit in a similar case agreed?  See Pineda-Moreno v. United States.

Of course he does — or so says Justice Alito, with Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan joining.  See Alito’s concurrence, slip op. at 13.  In fact, not only did Alito think the Court should reach the Katz expectation of privacy test, he didn’t buy the physical trespass holding at all, and lists its many flaws.  Justice Alito then evaluates the GPS surveillance here, noting that “devices like the one used in the present case … make long-term monitoring relatively easy and cheap.”  “[T]he best we can do in this case,” reasons Alito, “is to apply existing Fourth Amendment doctrine” and “ask whether the use of GPS tracking in a particular case involved a degree of intrusion that a reasonable person would not have anticipated.”  Alito at 13.  Under this inquiry, “the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy,” because “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not — and indeed, in the main, simply could not — secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”  Id.  Now, Justice Alito recognizes the “degree of circularity” inherent in Katz’s expectation of privacy test — i.e., the problem that, if read literally, the test would permit a situation in which the government takes away your privacy so that one no longer has an“expectation” of it — and in so doing, one no longer has a constitutionally protected interest in it.  Hello, 1984.  Unfortunately, though, his concurrence does nothing to address, and instead relies exactly on, that circular part of it — the intrusion you would or would not have anticipated.  The concurrence is also remarkably skimpy in its explication of why exactly the surveillance is “intrusive” — you know, the point that is the actual crux of the case.

The only Justice who doesn’t avoid the issues is Justice Sotomayor.  Although she joins the narrow majority opinion because she buys Scalia’s argument that the physical trespass here suffices to decide the case, she writes separately to make clear that “physical intrusion is now unnecessary to many forms of surveillance,” her slip op. at 2, a statement that Scalia certainly does not deny.

Moreover, and making this a much broader ruling than it appears on first glance, unlike Scalia, Sotomayor explains the distinction between Jones and Knotts.  She agrees with the Alito Four that “’longer term GPS monitoring in investigation of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy.’”  Sotomayor concurrence at 3, quoting Alito concurrence at 13.  Rather than relying on whether citizens “anticipate” invasions of their privacy, her opinion reflects the concerns of the D.C. Circuit, New York Court of Appeals, and C.J. Kozinski writing in dissent from denial of rehearing en banc in a similar case in the Ninth Circuit, that the information collected by GPS monitoring generates a “comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”  Id. at 3.  (In fact, unless we missed something, she appears to be the only one who cites to Chief Judge Kozinski’s dissenting opinion in the Pineda-Moreno case; no one seems to cite the DC Circuit opinion, scared off perhaps by some folks’ misplaced railing against its “mosaic” language).  She further discusses the concerns raised in a brief filed by some of us at the ISP on behalf of a group of privacy scholars that GPS surveillance, as she says, “evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices” and is susceptible to abuse, and that awareness of government monitoring chills associational and expressive freedoms.  Id.  She summarizes:

I would also consider the appropriateness of entrusting to the Executive, in the absence of any over­sight from a coordinate branch, a tool so amenable to misuse, especially in light of the Fourth Amendment’s goal to curb arbitrary exercises of police power to and prevent “a too permeating police surveillance,” United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 595 (1948).

Finally, Sotomayor suggests a more fundamental change in the jurisprudence to “reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties,” and notes that the rule is “ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks,” Sotomayor at 5, questioning the notion at the heart of the rule that “secrecy [is] a prerequisite to privacy.”

The long and the short of it is that by agreeing with the Alito Four that the use of GPS surveillance technology for a prolonged period violates a reasonable expectation of privacy, Sotomayor’s concurrence means that five justices agree to veer away from the inside/outside distinction relied upon by the Government.  It seems that we may have some privacy interests in our public movements after all.

One aspect of the brief [...]]]> Is the sky falling?  According to Florida et al., which filed their brief regarding PPACA’s Medicaid expansion today, the answer is a resounding yes.  In many respects, this brief rehashes the coercion arguments made in the district court and Eleventh Circuit.  The states continue to argue that they cannot afford the Medicaid expansion that will occur in 2014 (which I discussed on this blog here, here, and here), even though the federal government will pay 100% of the cost initially; and, they cannot afford not to participate in Medicaid because the costs of their medical welfare populations would be too high.  Thus, the states claim to be coerced into accepting this “onerous” new condition on federal funds.  Again, these arguments are not new. 

One aspect of the brief that was new was the inclusion of the severability arguments through describing the Medicaid expansion within the context of the universal insurance aspirations of PPACA (see especially fn. 18).   The states essentially contend that the minimum coverage requirement (“individual mandate”) gives impoverished Americans no option but to be in Medicaid, which in turn makes it so that the states cannot opt out of Medicaid.  The states further assert that this was Congress’s plan – to coerce the states by giving the poor no other options for obtaining minimum insurance coverage.  The fallacious assumptions underlying this argument are too numerous to unpack at this late hour, but at least two thoughts can start the job: first, New York v. U.S. does not require the federal government to offer alternatives to conditional spending programs (unlike, say, when it exercises commerce authority – the insurance exchanges in PPACA, which are a point of contrast in the brief, are an exercise of Commerce Clause authority, and states can either create them with some federal funding or reject them and the federal government will create the exchanges in the states that choose not to act — all of this fits neatly within the New York architecture).  Second, suffice it to say that the impoverished are not seeking private insurance alternatives to Medicaid.

Medicaid’s history is skewed by the brief more greatly than it was at lower court levels.  For example, the brief ignores the fact that Medicaid has always contained mandatory elements; these mandatory elements were one of the major defining features of the program as it was amended from Kerr-Mills, its predecessor program.  The brief also misrepresents the existence of mandatory eligibility and coverage standards and how they serve the aspirations of the program.  Likewise, the brief either misunderstands or misrepresents the minimum essential coverage requirement, which is actually more flexible for states than the mandatory coverage provisions for other Medicaid populations.  Additionally, the brief appears to misunderstand the statutory clarification that Medicaid provides both care and service (Congress here was responding to lower federal courts that had misconstrued certain language in the Medicaid Act).

Also, decisions such as Arlington, Dole, and Pennhurst that have required clear notice of conditions on spending are cited in the brief to support the states’ position that they have not voluntarily agreed to this condition on spending.  Before this point, the states have not argued that any other Dole element was violated, but the states now seem to indicate that these conditions were not unambiguous and thus the ‘contract’ with the federal government is unconstitutional.  In addition, the states offer a limiting principle that adopting their view of the coercion theory does not threaten other federal spending programs because Medicaid is by far the largest federal spending program (echoes of the federal government’s argument that nothing else is like healthcare).

Bottom line, the states want the Court to revive Butler and to expand the theory of coercion that the Court merely acknowledged in Dole and Steward Machine by relying heavily on Justice Kennedy’s concurrences and dissents that have expressed an interest in such an expansion.  The question is whether a majority of the Court is interested in a new limitation on Congress’s power to spend.

Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Christina Snyder issued an injunction against California preventing the implementation of the HHS-approved rate reductions because they would cause irreparable harm to [...]]]> After the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Douglas v. ILC, the Secretary of HHS approved some of California’s deep cuts in Medicaid reimbursement.   The Court requested additional briefing regarding the impact of the rate reduction approval, and the United States responded that the case was not moot because the grant of certiorari was based upon the Supremacy Clause question, not a determination as to the actual sufficiency of the state’s Medicaid payment rates.  As soon as the rate reductions were approved by HHS, the California Hospital Association, the California Medical Association, and other Medi-Cal providers filed additional claims for injunctive relief.  

Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Christina Snyder issued an injunction against California preventing the implementation of the HHS-approved rate reductions because they would cause irreparable harm to hospitals’ skilled nursing units (among other problems).  The new injunction keeps the issues in Douglas alive, whether as a matter of payment rate adequacy or as a matter of private enforcement of state violations of the Supremacy Clause.  Thus, even though HHS approved Medi-Cal rate reductions, the conflicts in Douglas have not been resolved. 

There is also a fascinating real-time separation of powers quandry in this case, which is highlighted by the injunction that was just issued.  Federal courts perceive states’ failure to abide by the mandate of the Equal Access provision, but HHS, whose job it is to ensure state compliance, turns a blind eye to state decisions that will limit access to medical care.  In the meantime, Congress does not modify the Equal Access provision to contain stronger language or a clearer private right of action, it merely relies on implied private enforcement actions (see the amicus brief of Members of Congress).  And HHS has issued paltry draft regulations to facilitate enforcement of the Equal Access provision, but the draft regulations do not guide CMS’s enforcement efforts so much as they provide some standards for states to self-report with little federal oversight.  It seems that federal courts are acting because the legislative branch either can’t or won’t, and because the executive branch either can’t or won’t ensure that this federal law is followed.  This makes the Obama Adminstration’s deference to state decisions all the stranger in Douglas, and courts’ patience with Equal Access litigation a bit more understandable.  It also helps to explain the sort of underlying tone of confusion at oral arguments.  The Court is left with the unenviable task of cutting this Gordian knot of inter-branch disfunction.

The Rehnquist Court excluded the Spending Clause from its federalism revolution inasmuch as that would have meant limiting the power to spend by the Tenth Amendment.  When Chief Justice Rehnquist authored South Dakota v. Dole, the evidence is that he believed it was an easy and relatively inconsequential case.  For those sane enough not to engage in the reading of tea leaves that is deciphering the [...]]]> I had intended to address Douglas next, as it is a nice gateway for discussing Florida v. HHS, but a defense of the coercion argument just published in the New England Journal of Medicine Online inspired me to address the latter first.  I will begin by discussing why I think the Court granted the petition for certiorari then turn to the Medicaid coercion question. 

The Rehnquist Court excluded the Spending Clause from its federalism revolution inasmuch as that would have meant limiting the power to spend by the Tenth Amendment.  When Chief Justice Rehnquist authored South Dakota v. Dole, the evidence is that he believed it was an easy and relatively inconsequential case.  For those sane enough not to engage in the reading of tea leaves that is deciphering the spending power, a quick review.  Dole articulates typical Rehnquist categories for evaluating the constitutionality of conditions placed on federal spending:  the spending must be for the general welfare; the conditions must be clear and unambiguous (as modified by Arlington Central School District Board of Education v. Murphy); the conditions must have a nexus with the federal spending (“germaneness”); and the conditions cannot themselves be unconstitutional.  After providing this test, Rehnquist noted that “in some circumstances the financial inducement offered by Congress might be so coercive as to pass the point at which ‘pressure turns into compulsion.’”  No theory or constitutional provision was cited, but the opinion indicated that coercion would depend on the amount of money or percentage of money withheld if the state violates the conditions.  It seems that the Court meant that coercion would be a Tenth Amendment, state sovereignty problem.  But, Dole also explicitly stated that the Tenth Amendment was not implicated in the bar on unconstitutional conditions.  So, while Dole provides the test for conditional spending, it is undertheorized and a bit self-contradictory.  Nevertheless, the Rehnquist Court reiterated that the Spending Clause is not limited by the Tenth Amendment in New York v. U.S. and held to that position in subsequent cases, disappointing many who believed spending to be the next front in judicially-enforced federalism.

The Roberts Court has given hints now as to its approach to spending as well as federalism, and members of the Court have signaled interest in revisiting both topics.  For example, Justice Kennedy’s concurrence in Comstock stated: “The limits upon the spending power have not been much discussed, but if the relevant standard is parallel to the Commerce Clause cases, then the limits and the analytic approach in those precedents should be respected.”  Justice Kennedy also addressed broader federalism concerns in that concurrence, which were given free rein in his opinion for the Court in Bond v. U.S. as well.  Likewise, Justice Alito’s opinion in Arlington was written as a spending power decision rather than a limited statutory interpretation, which I have written elsewhere resulted in a narrower clear statement rule for the second element of the Dole test.

Additionally, even though the Court seems to dislike hearing both spending and healthcare cases, it already has heard Douglas this term, so spending, federalism, and Medicaid are fresh in the justices’ minds.  And, what could be a better vehicle for considering coercion than the largest grant-in-aid program that also constitutes the second largest portion of states’ budgets?  (Education is first.)  Further, numerous lower federal courts have attempted to construe coercion, but none have struck down federal legislation under the doctrine, making the issue ripe for the Court’s consideration.

Despite the idea of coercion arising repeatedly in federalism cases over the last thirty-ish years, its contours are unknown.  At what point is the money being offered too much? And is the offer really the issue, or is the problem the amount or percent of money a state stands to lose if it does not comply with the conditions?  (Dole indicated the latter, as South Dakota was not coerced because it would lose only 5% of its federal highway funding if it refused to comply with the minimum drinking age that the federal government sought to impose.)  Can coercion only apply to an existing conditional spending program that a state could not leave because it has become dependent on the program?  Or is there some federal program that would offer so much money that no state could turn it down, even at the outset, such that the new program would be coercive?  If it is the former, then clear statement rules also need to be revisited, because they seem to assume some kind of regular restatement of the rules of the program to which a state actively agrees.  That simply does not occur in a long-standing program like Medicaid, making me think that clear statement rules are almost meaningless in that context.  Additionally, states inherently relinquish some sovereignty when they agree to the terms of a cooperative federalism program, highlighting tensions between dual sovereignty and cooperative federalism.

So, what is the upshot for the Medicaid expansion?  [more after the jump]

As I wrote last week, PPACA makes anyone under the age of 65 and earning less than 133% of the federal poverty level eligible to enroll in Medicaid.  Additionally, even though the federal government typically covers 50 to 83 cents on the Medicaid dollar, a match that varies by state per capita income and a few other factors, the federal government will pay 100% for the new population, which phases down to 90 cents on the dollar by 2020.  The states do not quarrel with the philosophical change in the program, and they do not claim that any other element of the Dole test is violated; instead, they claim that the expansion is impermissibly coercive because it will be too expensive for the states, and they stand to lose all of their Medicaid funding if they refuse to enroll the newly eligible population.  From a  Dole perspective, this argument is smart, as it covers the most obvious interpretations of coercion. 

But, from a Medicaid perspective, the argument is not persuasive for at least five reasons.  First, the federal government has always mandated the fundamental elements of Medicaid, the baselines of who is eligible and what services they must receive, while allowing states options that expand on the baselines.  At least twice before baseline Medicaid eligibility has been drastically expanded in this way, and the states remained in the program.  Second, the federal government is totally funding the expansion initially, then primarily funding it after the start up period.  Notably, a number of states have argued that they will benefit greatly from the Medicaid expansion, and they do not want to see it eliminated.    Third, the states have a number of years to plan administratively and fiscally for the expansion.  Even in 2014 they will only have to pay some of the administrative costs of the newly eligible (the federal government pays at least 50% of state administrative expenses in Medicaid in addition to matching medical expenditures).  States have time to leave Medicaid if they choose.  Fourth, though Florida et al. essentially argue they are locked-in to participating in Medicaid, and it is true that most states could not afford to run their own welfare medicine programs, it is not a direct line to concluding that states are coerced into participating in Medicaid.  Perhaps it simply means that Medicaid fills a need.  Fifth, spending legislation is the law of the land, just like any federal law, by virtue of the Supremacy Clause.  Telling the federal government that it cannot set the terms of its own duly enacted conditional spending statute would be a dangerous step toward reversing our understanding of the power to spend as its own enumerated power, which was endorsed by Hamilton.

The coercion issue is being taken seriously and is likely to be decided with an eye toward reinforcing the federalism ideals recently articulated in Bond.  I would not be surprised if a majority of justices are willing to expand the fifth element of Dole but then declare this particular act by Congress not to be unconstitutional – much like the 11th Circuit did.  So many major public programs ride on conditional spending structures, all stakeholders will potentially be affected by this decision. 

If you’ve read this far, thanks for sticking with me.  I’ll get back to my tea leaves now…

The United States Supreme Court will hear oral argument tomorrow in Messerschmidt v. Millender.  In this § 1983 case, the Court will consider the circumstances in which a law enforcement officer who prepares or executes an overbroad and/or insufficiently particularized search warrant is entitled to qualified immunity from damages.

Orin Kerr has posted an analysis of the case over on SCOTUSblog; I have little to add to his thoughtful commentary. As Professor Kerr appears to, I anticipate that the Supreme Court will find that on the facts before it, the police officers in question are entitled to qualified immunity, and reverse the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

But what if it doesn’t?  The case will [...]]]>

Not Quite Messerschmidt, But You Get The Idea

The United States Supreme Court will hear oral argument tomorrow in Messerschmidt v. Millender.  In this § 1983 case, the Court will consider the circumstances in which a law enforcement officer who prepares or executes an overbroad and/or insufficiently particularized search warrant is entitled to qualified immunity from damages.

Orin Kerr has posted an analysis of the case over on SCOTUSblog; I have little to add to his thoughtful commentary. As Professor Kerr appears to, I anticipate that the Supreme Court will find that on the facts before it, the police officers in question are entitled to qualified immunity, and reverse the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

But what if it doesn’t?  The case will return to the district court, and that’s when the really interesting (and under-examined) legal issues will arise. A very large share of the appellate caselaw that involves claims brought under § 1983 concentrates upon whether a defendant or defendants are entitled to qualified immunity. There is a relative dearth of precedent concerning matters such as damages and, especially, causation.  On any remand in Messerschmidt, however, possible causation and damages problems with the plaintiffs’ case may loom large, as they did in the last warrant case decided by the Supreme Court, Groh v. Ramirez.

In Groh, as some of you may recall, a law enforcement officer (an ATF agent, to be precise) goofed by failing to list the items to be seized in the search warrant itself (in the space on the warrant reserved for identification of these items, he simply typed in the premises to be searched). These items were identified in the affidavit, however, which also stated probable cause for the search. On these facts, the Groh majority held that qualified immunity was not available to the officer.

Once the case was remanded back to the district court, the United States (Groh was a Bivens case) emphasized that the error in question really wasn’t the cause of significant damages.  To understand this argument, recall that in tort law, a plaintiff must show that the defendant’s negligence was a “but for” cause (also known as a “cause-in-fact”) of the plaintiff’s injury. The key word is “negligence,” to be distinguished from “conduct.” The Third Restatement of Torts illustrates this point using a hypothetical driver who hits a pedestrian while driving 57 miles per hour in a 50-mile-per-hour zone. According to the Restatement, if the pedestrian sues the driver for negligence, her claim will falter for lack of causation, unless the driver would not have hit the pedestrian (or would have caused less damage) if he had been driving at the 50-mile-per-hour speed limit. (Significantly, in the Restatement’s ‘non-negligent’ counterfactual, the driver is operating his vehicle at a speed that’s at the very cusp of negligence.)

Similarly, on remand in Groh, after pointing out that conventional tort rules regarding causation apply in  § 1983 cases, the United States argued that in a perfect world that resembled what actually happened—except that there was no drafting error with the warrant—a search warrant for the premises still could and would have been issued and executed, in precisely the same way that the flawed warrant was. Therefore, according to the United States, the plaintiff in Groh should receive only nominal damages, since the agent’s error, properly isolated, did not cause any actual damages.

Groh settled prior to trial, so we don’t know how that argument worked out for the United States. Nevertheless, it seems likely that if the Supreme Court affirms the Ninth Circuit in Messerschmidt, the defense will make a similar argument on remand. The principal damage item in Messerschmidt appears to be the alleged emotional distress associated with the officers’ entry. (Here, keep in mind that the warrant was executed at around 5:00 a.m.) As in Groh, the defense will stress that the same entry presumably would have occurred pursuant to a properly tailored warrant, meaning that the plaintiffs’ primary damage item wasn’t really caused by the problem with the warrant.

This argument has its strengths and weaknesses (or at least, limitations), which I will avoid for now. Perhaps the more important point is that while we all focus a great deal on qualified immunity, other elements of a § 1983 cause of action remain precedential terra incognita, or nearly so, as to many of the different types of claims catalyzed by the statute.  It takes time to “fill in” the law surrounding a legal theory, and there simply haven’t been enough published decisions regarding many § 1983 theories for this to have occurred.

Moreover, certain attributes of a cause of action tend to be “filled in” faster than others.  My suspicion is that but-for causation is typically either the last, or one of the last elements of a claim to develop a substantial body of useful caselaw-created rules.  The delay owes to the fact that but-for causation is doubly shielded from appellate review.   A jury normally determines the “cut-off” line between negligence (or otherwise improper conduct) and non-negligent behavior; and as the Restatement hypothetical illustrates, it is this cut-off that serves as the baseline for their subsequent causation determination.  In effect, an appellate court tasked to review a but-for causation determination by a jury must peer inside a black box that is itself hidden inside another black box.  Little wonder, then, that there exist few useful but-for causation guideposts in the caselaw.

How should citizens in a republic bound by the rule of law regard the pretextual use of law by state officials?  If the United States Supreme Court is any indicator of the answer in our own republic, we are pretty ambivalent about pretext. 

Sometimes we don’t care very much.  In its most well-known case on the subject, Whren v. United States (1996), the Court upheld the pretextual use of the traffic code (which was prolix enough to be violated sooner or later by just about any car on the road).  Whren’s car was stopped by a vice squad cop who had a hunch (but not probable cause to believe) that Whren had drugs in his [...]]]>

Justice Scalia, author of Whren v. United States and Ashcroft v. al-Kidd (used with permission, www.courtartist.com)

How should citizens in a republic bound by the rule of law regard the pretextual use of law by state officials?  If the United States Supreme Court is any indicator of the answer in our own republic, we are pretty ambivalent about pretext. 

Sometimes we don’t care very much.  In its most well-known case on the subject, Whren v. United States (1996), the Court upheld the pretextual use of the traffic code (which was prolix enough to be violated sooner or later by just about any car on the road).  Whren’s car was stopped by a vice squad cop who had a hunch (but not probable cause to believe) that Whren had drugs in his car.  One lesson of this case is that you should always signal before making a turn.  Justice Scalia, writing for a unanimous Court, had another one: the police are free to do “under the guise of enforcing the traffic code what they would like to do for different reasons.”  In other words, a green light to pretextual traffic stops.

Sometimes, we care a great deal.  In Kelo v. City of New London (2005), the Supreme Court categorically rejected the idea that government officials may “be allowed to take property under the mere pretext of a public purpose, when [their] actual purpose was to bestow a private benefit.”  Likewise, interpreting Title VII in their concurrence in Ricci v. DeStefano (2009) (which concerned a city fire department), Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas highlighted the subjective component of liability in a civil suit for employment discrimination in a disparate-treatment case: the employer is liable if its facially legitimate reason for a decision turns out to be “just a pretext for discrimination.”  Justice Frankfurter long ago chastised the Court for sustaining a law “because Congress wrapped the legislation in the verbal cellophane of a revenue measure.”  The concept of limited and enumerated powers seems to suggest a general disapproval of pretext.

Does repeated pretextualism — whether one is making or enforcing the law — weaken the rule of law?  When tempted to use a law for an unintended purpose, how should the “good” official (read the adjective however you like) distinguish an innovative use from a destructive one?  My own motivation for this research stems from concern that using law to achieve an objective that the law was clearly unintended to achieve might do something destructive to the rule of law itself.  Maybe it does some harm to the official who wields power in that pretextual way, too, an official who may be the worst-placed government agent to exercise the sort of discretion that creative administration of the law demands.  Pretextualism may be habit-forming and, like cigarettes, unhealthy.

After the break, I’ll share my working definition of pretext and two cases separated by more than fifty years, but adopting the same pretextual technique to evade restrictions on government action.  One involves a Soviet spy whose case troubled the Supreme Court so much that the Court heard oral argument twice.  Surprisingly, that case foretold and influenced the “easy” Whren case.  The other involves a former college football player caught up in the current “War on Terror.”  That case, Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, was decided in May, also referencing Whren, but this time without such unanimity and with a lot more unease about pretext.

By pretext, I mean the use of legal authority for a purpose clearly and substantially different than the original reason for which the power was granted.  Pretextual use of laws will often be covert or unacknowledged.  That is, officials may feign to exercise their authority under the law’s original purpose or seek refuge in a double purpose.  But I do not mean to include the lawful use of subterfuge or deceit (such as when police conduct a sting or lie to a suspect during consensual questioning).  Those tactics may raise serious issues, but not pretext as I define it.  Nor do I mean to include prosecution for a lesser offense, such as convicting Al Capone for tax evasion.  Officials certainly wished they had the evidence to convict Capone of much more, but their tax prosecution was squarely within the intended use of that provision of the criminal code.  Michael Whren was never tried for violating the traffic code; it was a means to a different end that was used to avoid the Fourth Amendment’s restriction of the police.  Capone was indicted, tried, and convicted, for doing precisely what the law forbid.  Eliot Ness and his Untouchables didn’t use this law to evade some other restriction on their conduct.  The prosecution was the point.

Abel v. United States (1960)

KGB Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel

Consider the case of Rudolf Abel, the master KGB spy whose seizure, conviction, and exchange for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers I examine in a recent article.  Abel’s arrest was a classic instance of pretext.  The Fourth Amendment required FBI agents to obtain a warrant before they could seize Abel and search his room.  My research into the case convinced me that a warrant could have been obtained had one been sought.  But the men who pushed into Abel’s room early one morning, warrantless, knew that an arrest warrant carried undesirable consequences.  Such an arrest would lead to an arraignment in open court, the appointment of counsel, and all the attendant publicity such a hearing would entail.  That would ruin any hope of turning Abel into a double agent in an existential fight against the Soviet Union.

When Colonel Abel was rousted from his bed, he was therefore awakened on a pretext.  The FBI asked the INS to seize Abel under the pretext of enforcing the country’s immigration regulations while the FBI directed the operation from the doorway.  At the time, the INS could seize Abel without a warrant, acting only on the basis of an internal departmental order. 

The tale then takes a turn that might seem to have come from today’s headlines.  Abel was secretly flown from New York to McAllen, Texas, where he was interrogated without a lawyer and kept virtually incommunicado for almost seven weeks.  Following this unsuccessful effort to break him, the Justice Department then used the evidence obtained during their raid to convict him of espionage.  The use of this immigration authority for the unintended purpose of counterespionage neatly skirted the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, not to mention official disappearances.  On a purely formalistic level, the officials complied with the requirements of this immigration law.  On another level, the pretextual use of this statute produced results hard to justify as lawful.  When his lawyer argued pretext in an effort to exclude the (damning) evidence, the Supreme Court sustained his conviction.  The vote was close, 5-4, and Justice Douglas mockingly noted the real reason why a warrant was never sought for this arrest: “If the FBI agents had gone to a magistrate, any search warrant issued would by terms of the Fourth Amendment have to ‘particularly’ describe ‘the place to be searched’ and the ‘things to be seized.’  How much more convenient it is for the police to find a way around those specific requirements of the Fourth Amendment!  What a hindrance it is to work laboriously through constitutional procedures!  How much easier to go to another official in the same department!  The administrative officer can give a warrant good for unlimited search.  No more showing of probable cause to a magistrate!  No more limitations on what may be searched and when!”

Ashcroft v. Abdullah al-Kidd (2011)

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft

Fast foward fifty years.  Abdullah al-Kidd (a U.S. citizen and former University of Idaho football star) was cooperating with the FBI in a counterterrorism investigation.  The FBI alleged (how truthfully is sharply disputed) that al-Kidd was about to flee the country.  A criminal warrant for his arrest could not be sought because there was no probable cause to believe that al-Kidd had broken any law.  So the FBI obtained a material witness warrant, which may be had from a judge on grounds substantially easier to meet.  The material witness statute, 18 U.S.C. § 3144, was originally intended to secure “the testimony of a person [that] is material in a criminal proceeding” when it is impracticable to do so by other means, such as a subpoena or deposition.

Al-Kidd alleged that he was then held for sixteen days in high-security prisons in three states, housed with convicted criminals, subjected to frequent strip-searches, routinely shackled, and forced to sleep without clothes when he was not kept awake by bright lights in his cell.  He was interrogated without counsel.  He was then subject to severe restraints on his travel for fifteen more months. 

Al-Kidd claimed that the material witness statute was used pretextually, to interrogate him as a suspect in his own right, not as a witness to someone else’s wrongdoing.  His lawyers observed that his arrest was mentioned in congressional testimony by FBI Director Robert Mueller as an example of success in the Government’s counterrorism operations ( a strange statement if made about a witness, but not if made about a suspect).  In any event, al-Kidd was never called to testify at the trial, which ended in an acquittal on some counts and a hung jury on others.  So the Government never used the testimony that it claimed was material enough to justify his lengthy detention. 

Al-Kidd filed a Bivens action, alleging that his arrest was part of a nationwide policy to use the material witness statute pretextually.  When Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal began his argument for the United States last March, he started as you would expect a defense of pretextualism under the favorable Whren precedent to start: “This lawsuit seeks personal money damages against a former Attorney General of the United States for doing his job, allegedly with an improper motive …”  It was the right rhetorical focus.  Justice Scalia, delivering the opinion of the Court, noted that the Whren opinion “swept broadly to reject inquiries into motive generally” and “only an undiscerning reader” would disagree.  On the strength of the Whren analysis, the Court held that the material witness warrant “cannot be challenged as unconstitutional on the basis of allegations that the arresting authority had an improper motive.” 

But it turns out that the case wasn’t quite as easy for the Supreme Court to decide as Whren had been fifteen years earlier.  The opinion was announced on the last day in May, with concurring opinions by Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor (Justice Kagan took no part in the case).  Although no one dissented, the latter two opinions concurred only in the judgment reversing and remanding the lower court decision that had allowed the action to proceed.  Justice Kennedy (who, like Justice Ginsburg, had joined the Whren opinion) had more trouble.  He insisted that the opinion he joined left “unresolved whether the Government’s use of the Material Witness Statute in this case was lawful.”  Justice Ginsburg seemed to wonder, given al-Kidd’s allegations, whether the material witness warrant had been validly obtained in the first place.  In addition, Justice Ginsburg wondered at the alleged conditions of his confinement, especially since he was “[o]stensibly held only to secure his testimony[.]“  And Justice Sotomayor, also questioning the validity of the warrant, refused to join the majority’s opinion because “it unnecessarily resolves a difficult and novel question” of constitutional law.  For the newest justice participating in the case (and the one with far and away the most prosecutorial experience), ”[w]hether the Fourth Amendment permits the pretextual use of a material witness warrant for preventive detention of an individual whom the Government has no intention of using at trial is, in my view, a closer qusetion than the majority’s opinion suggests.”

My earlier post about the case is here.