Super Precedent or Too Big to Lose

It was difficult to sit through all the sanctimonious claims of doing law by adhering to precedent by a succession of Supreme Court nominees and then read its decision in BNSF R. CO. v. Tyrrell in which the Court overruled International Shoe v. State of Washington. Senators have been grilling the nominees for years about adherence to precedent. We heard about ordinary precedent, long standing precedent, and precedent that has been used and cited numerous times.

International Shoe was decided in 1945 by legendary justices. Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wrote the opinion. He was joined by Justices Douglas and Frankfurter, as well as justices Reed, Murphy, Rutledge and Burton who are less well known to the general public. There were no dissents. Justice Hugo Black concurred on the ground that the attack on the jurisdiction of the State of Washington was so frivolous it should have been dismissed out of hand. Justice Jackson was a member of the Court but recused himself and took no part. Effectively it was unanimous.

If ever a case was used and relied on it was International Shoe. Lexis, a legal database reported that International Shoe had been cited by nearly 22,000 judicial decisions at all levels of the American legal system, plus some 13,000 other sources. It showed no negative treatment.

International Shoe provided that companies could be sued either where the claim arose or where they did sufficient business to make it fair to sue them there.

Montana’s Supreme Court held that the defendant corporation could be sued in Montana “because it has over 2,000 miles of railroad track and employs more than 2,000 workers in Montana.” It other words, the company is quite busy in Montana. But the U.S. Supreme Court held that the corporation could only be sued at its home office.

In their freshman year, law students are drilled on International Shoe. Endless pages in textbooks are devoted to International Shoe. A pretty important decision indeed. But the Roberts Court didn’t like it.

Justice Sotomayor, as she often does, explained:

The majority’s approach grants a jurisdictional windfall to large multistate or multinational corporations that operate across many jurisdictions. Under its reasoning, it is virtually inconceivable that such corporations will ever be subject to general jurisdiction in any location other than their principal places of business or of incorporation. Foreign businesses with principal places of business outside the United States may never be subject to general jurisdiction in this country even though they have continuous and systematic contacts within the United States. … What was once a holistic, nuanced contacts analysis backed by considerations of fairness and reasonableness has now effectively been replaced by the rote identification of a corporation’s principal place of business or place of incorporation.  The result? It is individual plaintiffs, harmed by the actions of a farflung foreign corporation, who will bear the brunt of the majority’s approach and be forced to sue in distant jurisdictions with which they have no contacts or connection.

In other words, these companies are too big to lose. The more places a company does business, the further it can make plaintiffs travel. Even if plaintiffs can get to court over the hurdles placed by this Court, they will have to sue far away in unfamliar places. No barrier is strong enough to protect those companies which are already wealthy enough to give back to the society that protects them.

These cases have been decided under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendments. The word “due” means appropriate. It is an invitation to craft a jurisprudence that maximizes fairness to the parties. But the Court has been going the other way, grounding judicial power on happenstance, not fairness.

The Roberts Court is not doing law. Instead it has its own economic policy. It doesn’t seem to have noticed that voters in both parties have been demanding populism in economic policy. But who elected the Roberts Court?

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, July 18, 2017.

 

 

The Legacy of Barack Obama

Barack Obama has been one of our most decent and intelligent presidents. I’ll miss him. Instead of simplification and slogans, Obama explained the complexities of everything from medical treatment to foreign policy. Instead of shooting from the hip, he studied problems carefully and reached mature, intelligent decisions.

But what will stick?

Starting with foreign affairs, Obama got most of the boots off Muslim lands. When Obama took office in 2008 we had close to 200,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now we have about 15,000 troops, combined, there and in Syria.

ISIS seems to have refocused on Europe but that’s still a problem for us. Europeans’ objectives are compatible with our own, so they are crucial allies, unlike the Russians. But Europe confronts many times more refugees than we do, with backlash and threats to democracy in several countries. American action in Syria added to the refugee flow, but much resulted from revolutions independent of us. More American militarization in the Arab world would inflame the refugee crisis and increase the terrorism directed at us.

Terrorists are fueled by militarization; nations are much more vulnerable to our military – that’s the difference between defeating Saddam Hussein, having him executed and trying to remain there. Trump may talk tough, but will he be fool enough to wade back into those trouble waters?

In Guantanamo, fewer than 60 prisoners remain of the nearly 800 who were imprisoned there.

Republicans dislike the Iran nuclear deal but so far they’ve nothing to show for their fears. Objections from the other signatories may prevent Trump from disavowing it. This may be the first real test of whether Trump has any grip on reality.

At home, Republicans have been yelling for years that they will tear Obamacare down the first chance they get. But their friends in the insurance industry will howl if they do, especially if Republicans leave features Americans like – a guarantee that you can get insurance, coverage for pre-existing conditions, tax credits for small businesses, etc. So it’s not clear what they’ll actually do. Obama took his health care plan from Mitt Romney’s Republican plan. I can think of improvements to the left of Obamacare, but not any that are more consistent with Republican free-market philosophy. Republicans are in a pickle.

Obama got a small stimulus soon after taking office. Terrified it might actually work, Republicans fought to keep it small. Obama’s stimulus worked, slowly, satisfying the cynicism of Congressional Republicans willing to hurt the country in order to make Obama look bad.

Dodd-Frank financial regulation still stands, reigning in a financial system that gambled with everyone else’s money and made a large number of us much worse off.

Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. One has become the conscience of the Court, the other quieter and more conciliatory. Together, they’ve made a the Court much more fair. The future depends on how long Ginsburg lives and how long Trump is in office. The difference Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan made could disappear in a heartbeat.

So, there’s a lot to celebrate in what Obama did or tried to accomplish. But I have real fears of what could be done in the effort to discredit him instead of making things better for the people of America.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, January 3, 2017.

Sotomayor’s dissent in Utah v. Strieff, Part II

Last time I read a portion of a dissent by Justice Sotomayor.^[1] The Supreme Court of Utah had held that the Utah police had violated the defendant’s constitutional rights. The United States Supreme Court overruled that decision. In the portion of her opinion I read you last time, Justice Sotomayor explained what happens, not always, but what often happens when police stop people. And she explained what the Supreme Court authorizes police to do. Justice Sotomayor explained the ways that stops of people regardless of innocence of any crime, let alone any crime deserving jail time, can injure decent citizens. I didn’t have time to read you the last part of her opinion, so I will read it now:

This case involves a suspicionless stop, one in which the officer initiated this chain of events without justification. As the Justice Department notes,^[2] many innocent people are subjected to the humiliations of these unconstitutional searches. The white defendant in this case shows that anyone’s dignity can be violated in this manner.^[3] But it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny.^[4] For generations, black and brown parents have given their children “the talk”—instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger—all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them.^[5]

By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged.

We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere.^[6] They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.

***

I dissent.

Justice Sotomayor was born in New York City to parents from Puerto Rico. After compiling stellar records at Princeton and Yale Law School, she became a prosecutor, eventually going into private practice. She spent six years as a federal judge, another decade as a federal appellate judge, and joined the Supreme Court in 2009. She writes from every angle of the criminal justice system, as an experienced prosecutor, attorney, member of the community, and judge. Her citations are to decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Before she left the Court, Justice O’Connor wrote a stinging dissent to one of the decisions Justice Sotomayor cites.^[7] She was coming to understand the enormity of what the Court has authorized. But this is the Court we have. Is this the Court we want?

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, September 6, 2016.

[1] Utah v. Strieff, 136 S. Ct. 2056, 2069-71 (2016) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).

[2] [Dept. of Justice, Civil Rights Div., Investigation of the Newark Police Department 8, 19, n. 15  [2069]  (2014), online at https://www.justice.gov/sites /default/files/crt/legacy/2014/07/22/newark_findings_7-22-14.pdf.] at 8,

[3] See M. Gottschalk, Caught 119-138 (2015).

[4] See M. Alexander, The New Jim Crow 95-136 (2010).

[5] See, e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); J. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963); T. Coates, Between the World and Me (2015).

[6] See L. Guinier & G. Torres, The Miner’s Canary 274-283 (2002).

[7] Atwater v. Lago Vista, 532 U. S. 318, 360 (2001) (O’Connor, J., dissenting).

Sotomayor’s dissent in Utah v. Strieff, Part I

I want to read you a portion of a recent dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in which she explains what I think many do not understand about what happens when police stop people on the street.[1] I will skip her citations but you can read them on the website. She wrote the last part of her dissent for herself alone. I think it is well worth your hearing that portion of her dissent in Justice Sotomayor’s own words:

Writing only for myself, and drawing on my professional experiences, I would add that unlawful “stops” have severe consequences much greater than the inconvenience suggested by the name. This Court has given officers an array of instruments to probe and examine you. When we condone officers’ use of these devices without adequate cause, we give them reason to target pedestrians in an arbitrary manner. We also risk treating members of our communities as second-class citizens.

Although many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more. This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants—so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact.[2] That justification must provide specific reasons why the officer suspected you were breaking the law,[3] but it may factor in your ethnicity,[4] where you live,[5] what you were wearing,[6] and how you behaved.[7] The officer does not even need to know which law you might have broken so long as he can later point to any possible infraction—even one that is minor, unrelated, or ambiguous.[8]

The indignity of the stop is not limited to an officer telling you that you look like a criminal.[9] The officer may next ask for your “consent” to inspect your bag or purse without telling you that you can decline.[10] Regardless of your answer, he may order you to stand “helpless, perhaps facing a wall with [your] hands raised.”[11] If the officer thinks you might be dangerous, he may then “frisk” you for weapons. This involves more than just a pat down. As onlookers pass by, the officer may “‘feel with sensitive fingers every portion of [your] body. A thorough search [may] be made of [your] arms and armpits, waistline and back, the groin and area about the testicles, and entire surface of the legs down to the feet.’”[12]

The officer’s control over you does not end with the stop. If the officer chooses, he may handcuff you and take you to jail for doing nothing more than speeding, jaywalking, or “driving [your] pickup truck . . . with [your] 3-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter . . . without [your] seatbelt fastened.”[13] At the jail, he can fingerprint you, swab DNA from the inside of your mouth, and force you to “shower with a delousing agent” while you “lift [your] tongue, hold out [your] arms, turn around, and lift [your] genitals.”[14] Even if you are innocent, you will now join the 65 million Americans with an arrest record and experience the “civil death” of discrimination by employers, landlords, and whoever else conducts a background check.[15] And, of course, if you fail to pay bail or appear for court, a judge will issue a warrant to render you “arrestable on sight” in the future.[16]

More next time.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, August 30, 2016.

[1] Utah v. Strieff, 136 S. Ct. 2056, 2069-71 (2016) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).

[2] Whren v. United States, 517 U. S. 806, 813 (1996).

[3] Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1, at 21 (1968).

[4] United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S. 873, 886-887 (1975).

[5] Adams v. Williams, 407 U. S. 143, 147 (1972).

[6] United States v. Sokolow, 490 U. S. 1, 4-5 (1989).

[7] Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U. S. 119, 124-125 (2000).

[8] Devenpeck v. Alford,  [2070]  543 U. S. 146, 154-155 (2004); Heien v. North Carolina, 574 U.S. ___,  (2014).

[9] See C. Epp et al., Pulled Over, at 5 (2014).

[10] See Florida v. Bostick, 501 U. S. 429, 438 (1991).

[11] Terry, 392 U. S., at 17.

[12] Id., at 17, n. 13.

[13] Atwater v. Lago Vista, 532 U. S. 318, 323-324 (2001).

[14] Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington, 566 U. S. ___,  182 L. Ed. 2d 566, 573 (2012); Maryland v. King, 569 U. S. ___, 186 L. Ed. 2d 1, 30 (2013).

[15] Chin, The New Civil Death, 160 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1789, 1805 (2012); see J. Jacobs, The Eternal Criminal Record 33-51 (2015); Young & Petersilia, Keeping Track, 129 Harv. L. Rev. 1318, 1341-1357 (2016).

[16] A. Goffman, On the Run 196 (2014).