Full Transcript - Major Supreme Court Update
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Introduction
Today on legalese we will be discussing two more cases that were just announced earlier today that the supreme court will be hearing this term and theses are 2 potential landmarks in the making…
We got some really big news fresh out of the supreme court earlier today. Today in private conference the court would decide to grant cert on 4 more merits cases for the upcoming term. Two of these cases are so juicy I just had to add them to my Supreme Court Roundup. So today I am going to fill you in on two landmark cases that bring serious challenges against both Chevron Deference and Qualified Immunity.
Today we are covering two addition cases the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear for the 2023 term, the first one we will talk about is another Chevron Deference case that, just like Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo asks the Court to directly overturn Chevron Deference. The second one is a major challenge to when and how qualified immunity cases may be brought. Im gonna quickly cover each of those for you now.
Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce
The Supreme Court has added a second case asking it to overrule its landmark 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council to its docket for the 2023-24 term. The announcement came on a list of orders released on Friday afternoon from the justices’ private conference earlier in the day. The court will hear oral argument in both Relentless v. Department of Commerce, the case granted on Friday, and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which it agreed in May to review, sometime in January.
The Relentless case not only centers on the same question as Loper Bright – whether the court should overturn the Chevron doctrine, which instructs courts that they should defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of a statute as long as it is reasonable – but also arises from essentially the same set of facts – a challenge to a federal rule requiring fishing boats to pay for federal monitors. But unlike Loper Bright, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is not recused from the Relentless case, which would allow the full court to consider the Chevron question. Although the court might normally have simply put the case on hold until it ruled in the Loper Bright case, the court instead took the unusual step of fast-tracking the Relentless case for its consideration, suggesting that it might have other plans for the case. And at the same time, the Loper Bright case was conspicuously absent from the December argument calendar released on Thursday, even though the case will be fully briefed by the time the argument session begins.
Issue:
(1) Whether the court should overrule Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, or at least clarify that statutory silence concerning controversial powers expressly but narrowly granted elsewhere in the statute does not constitute an ambiguity requiring deference to the agency; and
(2) whether the phrase “necessary and appropriate” in the Magnuson-Stevens Act augments agency power to force domestic fishing vessels to contract with and pay the salaries of federal observers they must carry.
Gonzalez v. Trevino
In Nieves v. Bartlett, the Supreme Court held that when a plaintiff contends that he was arrested in retaliation for speech protected by the First Amendment, he must show that police did not have probable cause to arrest him. But the court carved out an exception to that rule for cases in which the plaintiff can show that he was arrested but others who had not been engaged in the same kind of protected speech had not been.
In Gonzalez v. Trevino, the justices agreed to decide what kinds of evidence will meet the exception outlined in 2019’s Nieves v Bartlett. The question comes to the court in the case of Sylvia Gonzalez, who was elected to the city council in Castle Hill, Texas, after promising to dislodge the supposedly corrupt city manager through a petition. Shortly after she was elected, Gonzalez was charged with violating a Texas law that bars destroying or tampering with government documents when the petition – which she had presented to the city’s mayor – was discovered in a binder she had brought to a city council meeting.
Gonzalez contested the charge, arguing that although the police may have had probable cause to arrest her, the charge had been brought in retaliation for her decision to exercise her First Amendment right to freedom of speech and petition. But although she presented evidence that other indictments for violations of the Texas law under which she was charged involved forging government IDs or tampering with financial records, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that the evidence was not enough to qualify for the Nieves exception. Instead, the court of appeals ruled, Gonzalez would have had to provide examples of people who “mishandled a government petition but were not prosecuted under” the Texas law.
Issues:
In Nieves v. Bartlett, this Court held that probable cause does not bar a retaliatory arrest claim against a “police officer” when a plaintiff shows “that he was arrested when otherwise similarly situated individuals not engaged in the same sort of protected speech had not been.” 139 S. Ct. 1715, 1727 (2019).
The circuits admittedly disagree on whether only specific examples of non-arrests, Pet. App. 28-29 (5th Cir. 2022), or any “objective proof of retaliatory treatment” can satisfy this standard, Lund v. City of Rockford, 956 F.3d 938, 945 (7th Cir. 2020); see also Ballentine v. Tucker, 28 F.4th 54, 62 (9th Cir. 2022).
Here, a 72-year-old councilwoman organized a petition criticizing a city manager, and unwittingly placed it in her binder during a council meeting. Two months later, respondents—the city manager’s allies—engineered her arrest for tampering with a government record. That charge has no precedent involving similar conduct, was supported by an affidavit based on the councilwoman’s viewpoints, and skirted ordinary procedures to ensure her jailing. The councilwoman sued respondents but no arresting officer.
The questions presented are:
(1) Whether the Nieves probable cause exception can be satisfied by objective evidence other than specific examples of arrests that never happened.
(2) Whether the Nieves probable cause rule is limited to individual claims against arresting officers for split-second arrests.
Closing
That’s all I have for you guys today. I would love to hear your comments on these cases. Please share any thought, question, argument, opinion, counterfactual & case predictions in the comment section.
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