Michael and Chantelle Sackett bought some Idaho land and began placing gravel fill on the site to prepare for laying a foundation for their dream home. Then they got something from the EPA: a “Compliance Order,” declaring that they were in violation of the Clean Water Act, because their land had been deemed a “wetland” subject to federal jurisdiction.

By beginning construction without a federal permit, the Sacketts were breaking the law and exposing themselves to civil and possibly criminal penalties, according to the Order. The Order instructed them to stop their construction and restore the property to its “original state” — it even told them what type of shrubbery to plant on the site, and exactly where to plant it. If they failed to comply with the order, they were subject to $37,500 fines per day.

The Sacketts were, understandably, shocked: they had no reason to think their property was a wetland; their neighbors had been allowed to build homes, and there was no indication in their title documents that the land was subject to federal control. So they asked for a hearing — and that was when they learned that the Compliance Order process does not entitle them to a hearing. They must either comply with the Order immediately to avoid the fines, or play chicken with the EPA — waiting until the EPA decides to file an “enforcement action.” At that time, they would be allowed to present their arguments that the land is not actually a “wetland.” But of course, by that time, the fines would have accumulated to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

Worse, these Compliance Orders are issued by a single EPA bureaucrat, on the basis of “any evidence.” That’s the language of the statute itself — and federal courts have interpreted “any evidence” to mean even an anonymous phone call or a newspaper story.

And a Compliance Order doesn’t just demand that you obey EPA’s orders or face fines — ignoring a Compliance Order is a separately punishable offense against federal law, aside from the liability for any environmental damage. In other words, you can face penalties for violating the Clean Water Act and also for ignoring a Compliance Order. Worse still, ignoring a Compliance Order can serve as the basis of a finding of “wilfulness,” and thus the basis of criminal charges.

Pacific Legal Foundation represents the Sacketts and argues that they should have their day in court — either under federal statutes like the Administrative Procedure Act or under the Due Process Clause — without having to face the possibility of devastating penalties.  PLF lawyer Damien Schiff argued the case today before the Supreme Court; while the justices were active in probing the weaknesses of both sides, the government’s lawyer didn’t do the EPA any favors.  So today may have ended being a very good day for the Sacketts, even if the New York Times editorial page took the alarmist stance that allowing them to seek pre-enforcement judicial review would be a ”big victory to corporations and developers who want to evade the requirements of the Clean Water Act.”

The case is Sackett v. EPA; read the argument transcript here and the briefs here.

This blogpost was coauthored by adjunct scholar Timothy Sandefur, who is a principal attorney at PLF and wrote about the case in Regulation magazine.

EPA Actions Should Be Subject to Judicial Review is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This blogpost was coauthored by Cato legal associate Chaim Gordon.

Thanks to the Institute for Justice, those suffering from leukemia and various other ailments that require them to wait for a bone marrow match to miraculously appear have new hope. Yesterday’s unanimous opinion by the Ninth Circuit in Flynn v. Holder effectively deregulates the bone-marrow market—and may even encourage lawmakers to rethink the disastrous federal prohibition on compensating organ donors.  (I previously wrote about the case here and here, and you can watch Cato’s forum on it here.)

At issue here is the National Organ Transplant Act, which prohibits patients from compensating would-be donors of life sustaining organs. The Ninth Circuit ruled that NOTA does not apply to blood (or blood subparts), and so it is entirely legal to sell bone marrow stem cells if those cells are extracted from the blood—as they are in 70% of donations—instead of from the bone marrow itself.

Unfortunately, the Ninth Circuit rejected IJ’s argument that Congress has no legitimate authority to interfere with the right to participate in safe, accepted, lifesaving, and otherwise legal medical treatment. In rejecting this argument, the court effectively held that NOTA’s ban on the sale of actual bone marrow was constitutional because an unregulated market posed certain dangers (especially of the exploitation of desperate patients).

It is highly unlikely that such exploitation could occur under current market conditions, however, because donors and patients have no way of contacting each other without the National Registry system that matches them. And, of course, the choice is not between a prohibition on compensation and complete non-regulation; some regulation may be appropriate, whether by legislation or simple action of the common law akin to how it operates to prevent extortion in other contexts.

The good news is that, with the bone marrow market effectively deregulated, Congress may now be motivated to reexamine its misguided ban on compensating organ donors. One of the greatest obstacles to reforming the prohibition on organ sales is the fortunate fact that relatively few Americans require organ transplants in any given election cycle. According to government statistics, 112,546 Americans are currently on some kind of organ transplant waiting list. That means only around 1 in 3,000 Americans (and their families and friends) would be seriously motivated to demand organ transplant reform from Congress. Congress will now be forced to grapple with its policies regarding bone marrow transplants, which may be an opportune time for advocates to push for wider organ transplant reform.

The Ninth Circuit’s opinion also clears the way for Supreme Court review of NOTA. If this case reaches the high court, IJ can press its constitutional arguments more forcefully. And even if the Supreme Court merely affirms the Ninth Circuit’s opinion on statutory grounds, we will inevitably learn much about the justices’ views on the constitutionality of NOTA more broadly.

For the moment, Flynn v. Holder means that, for the first time in over 25 years, a spotlight has been shined on NOTA and its disastrous effects on Americans’ medical liberty. And that is why the Ninth Circuit’s narrow bone marrow opinion may actually be a significant step toward the rational regulation of organ markets.

For more of Cato’s work in this area, see, for example, this paper and this op-ed.

Ninth Circuit Gets It Right, Deregulates the Bone Marrow Market is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This blogpost was coauthored by Cato legal associate Trevor Burrus, who also worked on the brief discussed below.

Rent control is literally a textbook example of bad economic policy. Economics textbooks often use it as an example of how price ceilings create shortages, poor quality goods, and under-the-table dealings. A 1992 survey revealed that 93 percent of economists believe that rent control laws reduce both the quality and quantity of housing.

As expected, therefore, New York City’s Rent Stabilization Law—the most (in)famous in the country—has led to precisely these effects: housing is scarce, apartment buildings are dilapidated because owners can’t charge enough to fix them, and housing costs have only increased (in part because costs are transferred to non-rent mechanisms such as “non-refundable deposits”). Yet the RSL persists, benefiting those grandfathered individuals who rent at lower rates but hurting the city as a whole.

Harmon v. Kimmel challenges New York’s law on the grounds that it is an arbitrary and unsupportable regulation amounting to an uncompensated taking that violates the Fifth Amendment.

Jim Harmon’s family owns and lives in a five-story brownstone in the Central Park West Historical District. The Harmons inherited the building—and along with it three rent-controlled tenants. Those tenants have occupied apartments in the building for a combined total of 91 years at a rate 59 percent below market. In their lawsuit, however, the Harmons face many unfriendly precedents that have given states free reign to regulate property, to the point that it is occupied on an essentially permanent basis while surviving Fifth Amendment scrutiny.

One way to challenge some of these laws is to argue they are so arbitrary and poorly justified that they violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Because this is an especially difficult type of challenge to bring, Cato joined the Pacific Legal Foundation and the Small Property Owners of San Francisco Institute on a brief supporting the Harmons’ request that the Supreme Court review lower-court rulings against them. Although the Court has ruled that the Takings Clause does not permit challenges based on claims that the alleged taking fails to “substantially advance legitimate state interests,” the Due Process Clause is an independent textual provision.

We thus clarify the relationship between property rights and due process, arguing that a law which advances no legitimate governmental purpose can be challenged under the Due Process Clause. To hold otherwise would be to deny property owners any meaningful avenue for defending their property from onerous and irrational regulations.

Rent Control Violates Property Rights and Due Process is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Challenges to Florida’s unconstitutional drug laws continue to gain momentum. Following a successful federal district court challenge to the constitutionality of state statutes lacking a mens rea requirement (mental culpability, rather than, for example, incidental possession), people convicted under them have come forward en masse to ask Florida courts to reexamine their convictions.

As described in the background to a previous brief in the case of Florida Dept. of Corrections v. Shelton, the district court held that these sorts of laws offend the constitutional guarantee of due process. Florida’s Supreme Court has now consolidated over 40 appeals resulting from that federal court decision (which itself is now on appeal). Cato has once again joined the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, ACLU, Drug Policy Alliance, Calvert Institute for Policy Research, Libertarian Law Council, and 38 law professors on a brief supporting the rights of persons convicted under the “strict liability” statutes.

We urge the Florida Supreme Court to follow the federal district court’s lead and strike down laws prohibiting the sale, possession, or delivery of illicit substances without requiring mental culpability. That court now has the opportunity to reverse these unwarranted convictions and purge a nationally singular stain on civil liberties.

The name of the case is Florida v. Adkins.

Thanks to legal associate Paul Jossey for his assistance with this brief and blogpost.

More on the Constitution’s Lack of a Drug-War Exception is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The administration argues that suspected al Qaida terrorists – even U.S. citizens – can be targeted for assassination because they either (a) pose an imminent threat or (b) are part of an enemy army; and (c) other governments are unwilling or unable to act. Although the Fifth Amendment ensures that persons not be denied due process, it’s unclear what process is “due” – especially when the person is a citizen. For example, a U.S. citizen who threatens hostages with imminent loss of life can be killed by law enforcement authorities. Similarly, an American who serves in a foreign army against which the United States is at war is plainly a legitimate target.

Moreover, under the Nationality Act, a citizen can lose his citizenship if he intends to do so (although intent can be inferred by actions) and he either (a) declares allegiance to a foreign state, (b) serves in a post requiring such a declaration, (c) serves in armed forces in combat with the United States, or (d) serves as an officer or NCO in the armed forces of a foreign state.

Still, the killing of Awlaki is a close legal call. On balance, it’s probably unlawful. The imminent-threat contention isn’t credible. To my knowledge, no one has identified a threat that is imminent (meaning: about to happen). The part-of-an-enemy-army claim and the loss-of-citizenship argument raise several questions: First, is the Nationality Act itself constitutional? The Constitution establishes criteria for citizenship. Stripping someone of citizenship effectively changes those criteria, and Congress may not have that power. Second, even if the Nationality Act is constitutional, does al Qaida qualify as a foreign state for purposes of the Act? Are al Qaida agents equivalent to soldiers engaged in combat with the United States? Third, even if the Nationality Act might apply in Awlaki’s case, how do we know that he triggered the provisions of the Act? Can the administration simply assert that he met one of the tests for loss of citizenship, or must there be some threshold process to make that determination?

Finally, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force sanctioned force against those involved in the 9/11 tragedy. Awlaki, although not directly involved, probably qualified as part of an “associated force”; but actions that might self-evidently be lawful if Awlaki were actively fighting on a battlefield are less so when he’s allegedly plotting attacks from Yemen.

All told, when U.S. citizens are targeted, I’d be more comfortable with somewhat more process – not a trial before an Article III court, of course, but perhaps the equivalent of an assassination warrant that required a non-executive-branch body with relevant expertise to certify sufficient cause. Anything less risks disrespect for the Constitution, which could have regrettable implications in other areas. The separation of powers doctrine, if it means anything, stands for the proposition that citizens cannot be killed on command of the executive branch alone, without regard to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Naturally, exceptions are justified for truly imminent threats. If I were convinced that involvement of another branch might result in Awlaki-types escaping punishment, I’d be more willing to invoke “emergency” powers – similar to hot pursuit – but not in this case.

Awlaki and Due Process is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In my Encyclopedia Britannica column this week, I take a look at “the responsibility of judges to strike down laws, regulations, and executive and legislative actions that exceed the authorized powers of government, violate individual rights, or fail to adhere to the rules of due process.”

Certainly they don’t always live up to those expectations, as Robert A. Levy and William Mellor wrote in The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom. 

The column might have been more timely last summer, when Judge Andrew Napolitano concluded one of his Freedom Watch programs on the Fox Business Channel by hailing four federal judges who had courageously and correctly struck down state and federal laws:

• Judge Martin L. C. Feldman, who blocked President Obama’s moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico;
• Judge Susan Bolton, who blocked Arizona’s restrictive immigration law;
• Judge Henry Hudson, who refused to dismiss Virginia’s challenge to the health care mandate; and
• Judge Vaughn Walker, who struck down California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage.

That was a good summer for judicial protection of liberty. But as I note, there have been more examples this year, reminding us of James Madison’s predictions that independent judges would be “an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive.”

How Judges Protect Liberty is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

My column at the Washington Examiner (and Reason.com) this week uses the collapse of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case to argue against the “perp walk,” which has become a form of pretrial punishment and a way for spotlight-hungry prosecutors to grab attention—whether the ‘perp’ turns out to be guilty or not:

Back in May, when New York law enforcement paraded DSK before the cameras, hands cuffed behind his back, the French were outraged. “Incredibly brutal, violent and cruel,” France’s former justice minister gasped.

Irritating as it might be to admit it, the French have a point. The “perp walk”—in which suspects are ritually displayed to the media, trussed up like a hunter’s kill—has become common practice among prosecutors. But it’s a practice any country devoted to the rule of law should reject.

Of course, DSK isn’t the most sympathetic victim of the perp walk ever, nor, given paramilitary policing and “no knock” raids, is the perp walk the most abusive police/prosecutorial practice out there. But it’s at best a pointless indignity, and at worst a threat to due process—which is why it should be reined in. For Cato work on police tactics and misconduct, go here; and also see Reason’s recent “criminal justice” issue.

DSK and the Pernicious ‘Perp Walk’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

People in the D.C. area maye be familiar with the tragic tale of Fairfax teacher Sean Lanigan, who was falsely accused of sexual molestation, resulting in termination and a destroyed reputation.  As pointed out by friend of Cato and Cato Supreme Court Review contributor Hans Bader, however, the Department of Education is pushing a policy that would allow for more Sean Lanigans, even in cases not involving anything close to rape or molestation:

If the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has its way, more teachers like him will end up being fired even if they are acquitted by a jury of any wrongdoing.  It sent a letter to school officials on April 4 ordering them to lower the burden of proof they use when determining whether students or staff are guilty of sexual harassment or sexual assault.   According to the Department of Education’s demands, schools must find people guilty if there is a mere 51% chance that they are guilty – a so-called preponderance of the evidence standard.   So if an accused is found not guilty under a higher burden of proof – like the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard that applies in criminal cases – the accused will still be subject to disciplinary action under the lower burden of proof dictated by the Education Department.

As Wendy Kaminer explains, the DoE would also like to strip the accused of their right to cross-examination:

Campus investigations and hearings involving harassment or rape charges are notoriously devoid of concern for the rights of students accused; “kangaroo courts” are common, and OCR ‘s letter seems unlikely to remedy them. Students accused of harassment should not be allowed to confront (or directly question) their accusers, according to OCR, because cross-examination of a complainant “may be traumatic or intimidating.” (Again, elevating the feelings of a complainant over the rights of an alleged perpetrator, who may have been falsely accused, reflects a presumption of guilt.) Students may be represented by counsel in disciplinary proceedings, at the discretion of the school, but counsel is not required, even when students risk being found guilty of sexual assaults (felonies pursuant to state penal laws) under permissive standards of proof used in civil cases, standards mandated by OCR.

Now, it is undoubtedly extraordinarily difficult for a rape victim to face her attacker, but lowering the standards under which someone is judged for that crime and not allowing the accused to question his accuser opens the door to using accusation as a weapon, just as in Lanigan’s case or that of the Duke lacrosse team.  Justice (what lawyers call “due process”) demands, among other things, that both accuser and accused have their day in court, and that there be a presumption of innocence.  It is no more just for an innocent person to be smeared and forever tarnished — if not convicted and imprisoned – than it is to let a guilty man go free.  Indeed, as Blackstone famously said, “Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” 

What’s more, as Foundation for Individual Rights in Education president Greg Lukianoff details, it’s not just accused rapists whose rights are prejudiced under the new OCR policy, but those who make bad jokes:

California State University–Monterey policies state that sexual harassment “may range from sexual innuendoes made at inappropriate times, perhaps in the guise of humor, to coerced sexual relations.” UC Berkeley lists “humor and jokes about sex in general that make someone feel uncomfortable” as harassment. Alabama State University lists “behavior that causes discomfort, embarrassment or emotional distress” in its harassment codes. Iowa State University states that harassment “can range from unwelcome sexual flirtations and inappropriate put-downs of individual persons or classes of people to serious physical abuses such as sexual assault.”

This disconnect between basic principles of free speech and due process creates what Lukianoff calls “a perfect storm for rights violations”:

By making it clear that OCR would be aggressively pursuing harassment claims, by mandating extensive changes to many universities’ due process protections, but not requiring universities to adopt a uniform standard for harassment, OCR has supercharged the power of existing campus speech codes. OCR could have done our nation’s colleges a favor if it required universities to adopt a uniform definition of harassment in the same breath as it required them to aggressively police it.

FIRE has done heroic work in protecting student rights, so you should really read all of Lukianoff’s indictment of the new policy. 

The Department of Education needs to rescind/clarify this mess.  Speech is not a crime, but even the rights of those accused of crimes should not be subordinated to misplaced compassion or political correctness.

Due Process Stops at the Campus Gates? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The representation of prisoners accused of capital crimes is unique in its difficulty — and in the consequences — when that representation is inadequate. Maples v. Thomas, which will be argued before the Supreme Court this fall, exposes some of the serious cracks in the system charged with representing indigent defendants in such cases.   

Cato takes no position on the merits of the death penalty other than that the Constitution does not prohibit it and that our justice system is responsible for, at the very least, ensuring that prisoners receive fair notice of orders on which their lives depend.  Both the courts and counsel failed Cory Maples here. 

Maples was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death for killing two companions.  After a series of state court appeals which affirmed his conviction, Maples filed a petition for post-conviction relief, which was ultimately dismissed. 

Maples never received notice of this deadline-triggering order because his pro bono lawyers left their big-firm jobs and a court clerk did nothing when the letter containing the order was consequently returned unopened.  Because Maples did not receive notice of the deadline, he did not timely file an appeal and his claims were procedurally defaulted.  The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the district court’s denial of Maples’s subsequent federal habeas petition because Maples “cannot establish cause for his default because there is no right to post-conviction counsel.” 

Cato has now joined The Constitution Project to file an amicus brief supporting Maples and arguing that the Supreme Court should excuse his default because the state failed to notify him of an order that could result in his death.  Moreover, if the default is not excused, the state’s inaction will deny Maples his constitutional right of meaningful access to the courts. 

The Eleventh Circuit relied on the rule that because “there is no constitutional right to an attorney in state post-conviction proceedings, a petitioner cannot claim constitutionally ineffective counsel in such proceedings.”  But Maples’s habeas claim does not involve the ineffectiveness of his post-conviction counsel; his underlying claim is that his trial counsel provided ineffective assistance. Indeed, his post-conviction counsel provided no assistance whatsoever when it was time to appeal. 

Finally, there is cause to excuse Maples’s default because this case is ultimately governed by principles of equity and basic fairness.  Few if any reasonable observers would conclude that it is fair or equitable to put a man to death without allowing the least consideration of appellate claims that could save his life simply because his lawyers left their jobs, a firm mailroom returned letters to them unopened, and the court clerk’s office did nothing when it discovered that crucial notice was never received. 

Again, the case is Maples v. Thomas and you can read Cato’s brief here.

Notice of Court Orders Is Important in Death Penalty Cases is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There is a growing trend among federal agencies and courts to incrementally expand the government’s enforcement power by adopting statutory interpretations that go beyond their plain meaning and intent. National Corn Growers v. EPA exemplifies such government overreach.

Under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the Environmental Protection Agency establishes limits, or “tolerances,” for pesticide residues on food.  If a pesticide residue exceeds an established tolerance it is deemed “unsafe” and the product is removed from interstate commerce—effectively banned from use. The EPA must modify or revoke a tolerance it deems unsafe through a “notice and comment” process.  Both the FFDCA and its implementing regulations require the EPA to hold a public evidentiary hearing if any objections raise a “material issue of fact.”

In National Corn Growers, the pesticide carbofuran was registered for use in 1969 by the EPA and has been safely used for pest control for a variety of crops for more than 40 years.  Recently, however, the EPA overlooked “material issues of fact” raised by the National Corn Growers and revoked all tolerances for carbofuran without a public hearing. In a decision that gives sole discretion to the EPA to determine the fate of hundreds of thousands of products already in the market, the D.C. Circuit held that courts must defer to the agency.  The court declared that differences in scientific studies are insufficient for judicial review, essentially writing “material issue of fact” out of the Act.

Cato joined the Pacific Legal Foundation in filing a brief arguing that Supreme Court review is warranted because the D.C. Circuit undermined the legal requirement for a public hearing under the FFDCA.  Moreover, because this case sets a precedent for other regulated products and allows government agencies to unlawfully deprive citizens of their property without adequate access to court review, we argue that the Supreme Court should take this case to: (1) establish the proper standard for review under the FFDCA for a public hearing; (2) curtail abuse of the administrative process; and (3) establish that complete deference is not compatible with a summary-judgment-type proceeding.

The right not to be deprived of one’s property without fair process is a bedrock principle of American jurisprudence.  The Court should reinforce this principle and ensure that statutory safeguards intended to protect this right are not ignored. 

Thanks to Cato legal associate Caitlyn McCarthy for her help with the brief and with this summary.

Courts Must Review Agency Actions is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Assorted media clips worth catching up with over the holiday:

• You’ve probably seen the ongoing scandal about how local officials used the southern California city of Bell to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. A Los Angeles Times investigation finds that the city was milking small tradespeople too: “Legal experts point to a lack of due process and judicial oversight in hundreds of ‘civil compromises,’ in which plumbers, carpet cleaners and bottle-gatherers paid up to $1,000 for alleged code violations.”
• “To get the check, you’ve got to medicate the child”: a horrifying Boston Globe series exposes how the incentives created by the federal SSI dependent disability program result in the overdiagnosis of disability among school-age kids. The result can be lifelong dependency, especially when grown kids realize that entering the labor force would make their families worse off by losing the “disability money.” [first, second, third parts, more]
• A U.S. Congressman ousted by Ohio voters in last month’s election is suing a PAC that campaigned against him, saying its unfair ads deprived him of his “livelihood” [Cincinnati Enquirer, Politico]
• The supposedly poisoned town of Hinkley, Calif., made famous by the Julia Roberts vehicle Erin Brockovich, turns out to have cancer rates a bit below the average, a new epidemiological study finds [more];
• Aside from the morality aspects, there are really good reasons not to steal a meerkat (via).

Recommended Reading is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

On Thursday the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act. Its backers, including Hollywood and the recording industry, are hoping to rush the legislation through Congress during the current “lame duck” session. The legislation empowers the attorney general to draw up a list of Internet domain names he considers to be “dedicated to infringing activities,” and to obtain a variety of court orders designed to block access to these sites for American Internet users.

To understand the proposal, it helps to know a bit about the Domain Name System, or DNS, that is the focus of the bill. The DNS is the Internet’s directory service. Computers on the Internet are assigned (mostly) unique numbers like “72.32.118.3,” but these numbers are not convenient for human users to remember. So instead websites use domain names like “cato.org,” and our computers use the DNS system to automatically translates these names into their corresponding IP addresses. DNS is a distributed system; thousands of Internet Service Providers operate DNS servers for the use of their own customers.

Under COICA, when the attorney general accused a domain name of being “dedicated” to copyright infringement, the courts would issue orders not against the owners of the domain name (who may be overseas) but against domain-name registrars and the operators of DNS servers here in the United States. This means that thousands of systems administrators would be required to maintain a large and constantly-changing list of blacklisted domains. This is a significant and unfair administrative burden on private parties who have absolutely no connection to infringing activities.

The legislation falls far short of constitutional due process requirements. Legal injunctions would be issued upon the attorney general’s mere accusation of “infringing activities.” Not only would the owner of the domain name not have an opportunity to contest the allegations, he would not even have to be notified. And the parties who would receive notice under the legislation—DNS registrars and server administrators—will typically have no knowledge of or connection to the accused domain, which means they would have neither the knowledge or the motivation to dispute unreasonable orders.

This is especially problematic because we are talking about constitutionally-protected speech here. The Supreme Court has long held that prior restraints of speech are unconstitutional. The websites on the government’s blacklist may have a large amount of constitutionally-protected speech on them, in addition to allegedly-infringing material. Not only does COICA not require the government to prove its allegations before a domain name is blocked, it doesn’t require the government to ever prove them.

Earlier this year, my colleague Jim Harper praised Secretary Clinton’s speech making Internet freedom a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s diplomatic agenda. Secretary Clinton was right to lecture foreign governments about the evils of Internet censorship; her former colleagues in the US Senate should listen to her.

Internet Censorship Bill Threatens Free Speech, Rule of Law is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Carl Malamud is a breakthrough thinker and doer on transparency and open government. In the brief video below, he makes the very interesting case that various regulatory codes are wrongly withheld from the public domain while citizens are expected to comply with them. It’s important, mind-opening stuff.

It seems a plain violation of due process that a person might be presumed to know laws that are not publicly available. I’m not aware of any cases finding that inability to access the law for want of money is a constitutional problem, but the situation analogizes fairly well to Harper v. Virginia, in which a poll tax that would exclude the indigent from voting was found to violate equal protection.

Regulatory codes that must be purchased at a high price will tend to cartelize trades by raising a barrier to entry against those who can’t pay for copies of the law. Private ownership of public law seems plainly inconsistent with due process, equal protection, and the rule of law. You’ll sense in the video that Malamud is no libertarian, but an enemy of an enemy of ordered liberty is a friend of liberty.

Private Ownership of Public Law is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

That’s the claim the Obama administration made in court. As Glenn Greenwald puts it:

[W]hat’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”:  in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

Italics in the original. My colleagues Gene Healy and Nat Hentoff have expressed concerns about targeted killings. Charlie Savage wrote a good piece on this that highlights how even the most ardent defenders of executive power may blush at this broad claim of power.

The government’s increasing use of the state secrets doctrine to shield its actions from judicial review has been contentious. Some officials have argued that invoking it in the Awlaki matter, about which so much is already public, would risk a backlash. David Rivkin, a lawyer in the White House of President George H. W. Bush, echoed that concern.

“I’m a huge fan of executive power, but if someone came up to you and said the government wants to target you and you can’t even talk about it in court to try to stop it, that’s too harsh even for me,” he said.

In fairness, Rivkin would defend the administration’s claim of power on other grounds — that targeting is a “political question” for the elected branches of government — but this approach seems to have lost out because it invites the judiciary to determine whether the U.S. is at war in Yemen.

Amending the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress after 9/11 is long overdue. What groups are we truly at war with, where does the line between war and peace sit, who can we detain and kill, and what process is owed before a citizen may be targeted with lethal force? Questions of war are political in nature, and if we don’t know the answers, it is Congress’ role to step in and provide them.

Targeted Killing of U.S. Citizen a State Secret? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

That’s the message of my recent op-ed in the Daily Caller. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s initial reaction to the McDonald v. City of Chicago decision was to say that McDonald would have no impact on government’s ability to keep guns “out of the hands of criminals and terrorists.” This was a reference to legislation that Bloomberg supports that would allow the federal government to bar anyone the Attorney General thinks is a terrorist from purchasing a firearm. Not convicted of a crime in support of terrorism — that would make them a felon and already unable to purchase or own a firearm. No, being suspected of activity in support of or preparation for terrorism means you get the same treatment as if you were a convicted felon or had been involuntarily committed to a mental institution. So much for due process.

While D.C. v. Heller is the relevant decision (the AG’s double secret probation list is a federal, not state action), the premise of this legislation needs to be refuted. The proposition that guns and gun ownership are uniquely dangerous such that the right to keep and bear arms must be treated as a second-class provision of the Bill of Rights is willfully blind of the other instances where society accepts risk by safeguarding liberty in the face of foreseeable hazards. Justice Stephen Breyer embraced this misguided concept –– that the right to keep and bear arms is an enumerated, but non-fundamental, right that deserves a lesser degree of protection than the rest of the provisions of the Bill of Rights — in his McDonald dissent.

I counter that notion in this podcast:

Related thoughts from Ilya Somin here.

Liberty Requires Risk is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Stripping the citizenship of those who take up arms against the United States is not a controversial proposition. Indeed, under existing law, American citizenship can be taken away from any adult who, among other actions, makes a formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state, serves in the armed forces of a foreign state if such armed forces are engaged in hostilities against the United States, or commits any act of treason against the United States. The Lieberman-Brown bill, which adds to that list the provision of material support to State Department-recognized terrorist organizations (most notably Al Qaeda) or actively engaging in hostilities against the United States, is thus not problematic on its face. It merely clarifies, in an age where America’s enemies aren’t necessarily other countries, that a person need not ally himself with a hostile “foreign state” to risk expatriation.

Still, the Terrorist Expatriation Act does raise concerns about how the new citizenship-stripping provisions would be applied. Expatriation is a serious remedy that is warranted only in the most serious cases — such as, indeed, treason or taking up arms against your own country. If and when the act becomes law, courts will maintain a high bar for what constitutes “material support” of terrorist organizations (such that it constitutes relinquishing U.S. nationality), and the subject of the expatriation action will — under existing law that will remain unchanged — have notice and opportunity to challenge the decision.

In short, this is neither a radical threat to civil liberties nor an ineffectual political stunt. Assuming the above constitutional protections remain in place, the expansion of federal expatriation law should be seen as a prudent, necessary, and uncontroversial measure that deals with the realities of the modern world.

The Lieberman-Brown Bill Merely Updates Expatriation Law for the 21st Century is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It is more than three years since the Office of the Inspector General first brought public attention to the FBI’s systematic misuse of the National Security Letter statutes to issue fictitious “exigent letters” and obtain telecommunications records without due process. Nobody at the Bureau has been fined, or even disciplined, for  this systematic lawbreaking and the efforts to conceal it. But the bipartisan outrage expressed at a subcommittee hearing of the House Judiciary Committee this morning hints that Congress may be running out of patience—and looking for some highly-placed heads to roll. Just to refresh, Committee Chairman John Conyers summarized the main abuses in an opening statement:

The IG found that more than 700 times, such information was obtained about more than 2,000 phone numbers by so-called“exigent letters” from FBI personnel. In some cases, the IG concluded, FBI agents sent the letters even though they believed that factual information in the letters was false. For more than 3,500 phone numbers, the call information was extracted without even a letter, but instead by e‐mail, requests on a post‐it note, or “sneak peaks” of telephone company computer screens or other records…. In one case, the FBI actually obtained phone records of Washington Post and New York Times reporters and kept them in a database, leading to an IG conclusion of “serious abuse” of FBI authority and an FBI public apology.

It’s probably actually worse than that: Since these letters often requested a “community of interest” analysis for targeted numbers, the privacy of many people beyond the nominal targets may have been implicated—though it’s hard to be sure, since the IG report redacts almost all details about this CoI mapping.

And as Rep. Jerry Nadler pointed out, the IG report suggests a “clear pattern here of deliberate evasion,” rather than the innocent oversight the Bureau keeps pleading.  Both Nadler and the Republican ex-chair of the committee, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, expressed frustration at their sense that, when the FBI had failed to win legislative approval for all the powers on its wish list, it had simply ignored lawful process, seizing by fiat what Congress had refused to grant. Sensenbrenner, one of the authors of the Patriot Act, even declared that he felt “betrayed.” But we’ve heard similar rhetoric before. It was the following suggestion from Conyers (from my notes, but pretty near verbatim) that really raised an eyebrow:

There must be further investigation as to who and why and how somebody in the Federal Bureau of Investigation could invent a practice and have allowed it to have gone on for three consecutive years.  I propose and hope that this committee and its leadership will join me, because I think there may be grounds for removal of the general counsel of the FBI.

That would be Valerie Caproni, one of the hearing’s two witnesses, and an executive-level official whose dismissal would be the first hint of an administration response commensurate with the gravity of the violations that occurred. Caproni’s testimony, consistent with previous performances, was an awkward effort to simultaneously minimize the seriousness of FBI’s abuses—she is fond of saying “flawed” when le mot juste is “illegal”—and also to assure legislators that the Bureau was treating it with the utmost seriousness already. Sensenbrenner appeared unpersuaded, at one point barking in obvious irritation: “I don’t think you’re getting the message; will you get the message today?” The Republican also seemed to indirectly echo Conyers’ warning, declaring himself “not unsympathetic” to the incredulous chairman’s indictment of her office. Of course, the FBI has it’s own Office of Professional Responsibility which is supposed to be in charge of holding agents and officials accountable for malfeasance, but apparently the wheels there are still grinding along.

It’s also worth noting that Inspector General Glenn Fine, who also testified, specifically urged Congress to look into a secret memo issued in January by the Office of Legal Counsel, apparently deploying some novel legal theory to conclude that many of the call records obtained by the FBI were not covered by federal privacy statutes after all. This stood out just because my impression is that OIG usually limits itself to straight reporting and leaves it to Congress to judge what merits investigation, suggesting heightened concern about the potential scope of the ruling, despite FBI’s pledge not to avail itself of this novel legal logic without apprising its oversight committees. Alas, the details here are classified, but Caproni did at one point in her testimony conclude that “disclosure of approximately half of the records at issue was not forbidden by ECPA and/or was
connected to a clear emergency situation.”  There were 4,400 improperly obtained “records at issue” in the FBI’s internal review, of which about 150 were ultimately retained on the grounds that they would have qualified for the emergency exception in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.  Since that tally didn’t include qualifying records for which legitimate process had nevertheless been issued at some point, the number of “real” emergencies is probably slightly higher, but that still suggests that the “half” Caproni alludes to are mostly in the “disclosure…not forbidden by ECPA” category.  Since ECPA is fairly comprehensive when it comes to telecom subscriber records—or at least, so we all thought until recently—we have to assume she means that these are the types of records the OLC opinion has removed from FISA’s protection. If those inferences are correct, and the new OLC exception covers nearly half of the call detail records FBI obtains, that would not constitute a “loophole” in federal electronic privacy law so much as its evisceration.

Of course, it’s possible that the specific nature of the exception would allay civil libertarian fears. What’s really intolerable in a democratic society is that we don’t know. Operational facts about specific investigations, and even specific investigatory techniques, are rightly classified. But an interpretation of a public statute so significant as to potentially halve its apparent protections cannot be kept secret without making a farce of the rule of law.

Accountability for ‘Exigent Letter’ Abuse At Last? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As I blogged last week, the Supreme Court didn’t seem amenable to Privileges or Immunities Clause arguments in last week’s gun rights case, McDonald v. Chicago.  This is unfortunate because the alternative, extending the right to keep and bear arms via the Due Process Clause, continues a long-time deviation from constitutional text, history, and structure, and reinforces the idea that judges enforce only those rights they deem “fundamental” (whatever that means).

It was especially disconcerting to see Justice Antonin Scalia, the standard-bearer for originalism, give up on his own preferred method of interpretation — and for the sole reason that it was intellectually “easier” to use the “substantive due process” doctrine.

Josh Blackman and I have an op-ed in the Washington Examiner pointing out Scalia’s hypocrisy.  Here’s a choice excerpt:

Without the Privileges or Immunities Clause … the Court must continue extending the un-originalist version of substantive due process to protect the right to keep and bear arms. To give original meaning to the Second Amendment, it must ignore the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment!

Yet this is the line Scalia took last week: Instead of accepting the plain meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause—which uncontrovertibly protects the right to keep and bear arms—the justice chose a route that avoids disturbing a 140-year-old precedent rejected by legal scholars of all ideological stripes.

In 2008, Scalia wrote, “It is no easy task to wean the public, the professoriate, and (especially) the judiciary away from [living constitutionalism,] a seductive and judge-empowering philosophy.” But at the arguments in McDonald, he argued that while the Privileges or Immunities Clause “is the darling of the professoriate,” he would prefer to follow substantive due process, in which he has now “acquiesced,” “as much as [he] think[s it is] wrong.”

Put simply, if the opinion Scalia writes or joins matches his performance last week, he can no longer be described as an originalist (faint-hearted or otherwise).  A liberty-seeking world turns its weary eyes to Justice Clarence Thomas — who has expressed an openness to reviving the constitutional order the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to create — to convince his wayward colleague that the way to interpret legal text is to look to its original public meaning.

Read the whole thing.

Scalia Can No Longer Call Himself an Originalist is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’ve been meaning to follow up on Gene Healy’s post from last week on the interrogation and prosecution of terror suspects.  I share Gene’s bemusement at the howls emanating from Republicans who have abruptly decided that George Bush’s longstanding policy of dealing with terrorism cases through the criminal justice system is unacceptable with a Democrat in the White House.  But I also think it’s worth stressing that the arguments being offered — both in the specific case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and more generally — aren’t very persuasive even if we suppose that they’re not politically motivated.

Two caveats.  First, folks on both sides would do well to take initial reports about the degree of cooperation terror suspects are providing with a grain of salt. For reasons too obvious to bother rehearsing, investigators won’t always want to broadcast accurately or in detail the precise degree of cooperation a suspect is providing.   Second, as Gene noted, given that it seems unlikely we’ll need to use Abdulmutallab’s statements against him at trial, the question of whether the civilian or military system is to be preferred can be separated from the argument about the wisdom of Mirandizing him. That said, the facts we have just don’t seem to provide a great deal of support for the conclusion that, warning or no, criminal investigators are somehow incapable of effectively questioning terrorists.

Certainly if you ask veteran FBI interrogators, they don’t seem to share this concern that they won’t be able to extract intelligence their military counterparts would obtain. You might put that assessment down to institutional pride, but it’s consistent with the evidence, as the FBI has had impressive successes on this front already. And if you don’t want to take their word for it, you can always ask Judge Michael Mukasey who, before becoming attorney general under George W. Bush, ruled that military detainees were entitled to “lawyer up” — as critics of the Bush/Obama approach are wont to put it — explicitly concluding that “the interference with interrogation would be minimal or nonexistent.”

Nor, contra the popular narrative, does it appear to have interfered in the Abdulmutallab case.  Republicans leapt to construe sketchy early reports as implying that the failed bomber had been talking to investigators, then clammed up upon being read his Miranda rights and provided with counsel. But that turns out to have gotten the order of events wrong. In reality, Abdulmutallab was initially talkative — perhaps the shock of having set off an incendiary device in his pants overrode his training — but then ceased cooperating before being Mirandizied. Rather, it was the urging of his family members that appears to have been crucial in securing his full cooperation — family members whose assistance would doubtless have been far more difficult to secure without assurances that he would be treated humanely and fairly within the criminal justice system. It’s possible, one supposes, that the emo terrorist might have broken still more rapidly in military custody, but it seems odd to criticize the judgment of the intelligence professionals directly involved with the case, given that their approach has manifestly worked, on the basis of mere speculation about the superior effectiveness of an alternative approach.

Stepping back from this specific case, there seem to be strong reasons to favor recourse to the criminal systems in the absence of some extraordinarily compelling justification for departing from that rule in particular cases. Perhaps most obviously, few terror suspects are quite so self-evidently guilty as Abdulmutallab, and so framing the question of their treatment as one of the due process rights afforded “terrorists” begs the question. The mantra of those who prefer defaulting to military trial is that “we are at war” — but this is an analytically unhelpful observation.  We’re engaged in a series of loosely connected conflicts, some of which look pretty much like conventional wars, some of which don’t. This blanket observation tells us nothing about which set of tools is likely to be most effective in a particular case or class of cases — any more than it answers the question of which battlefield tactics will best achieve a strategic goal.

For the most part, the insistent invocation of the fact that “we’re at war” seems to be a kind of shibboleth deployed by people who want to signal that they are Very, Very Serious about national security without engaging in serious thought about national security. If it came without costs, I would be loath to begrudge them this little self-esteem boosting ritual. But conflict with terrorists is, by definition, a symbolic conflict, because terrorism is first and foremost a symbolic act. As Fawaz Gerges documents in his important book The Far Enemy, jihadis had traditionally been primarily concerned with the fight to impose their rigid vision in the Muslim world, and to depose rulers perceived as corrupt or too secular.  The controversial — and even among radical Islamists,quite unpopular — decision to strike “the Far Enemy” in the United States was not motivated by some blind bloodlust, or a desire to kill Americans as an end in itself. Rather, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri hoped that a titanic conflict between Islam and the West could revive flagging jihadi movement, galvanize the ummah, and (crucially) enhance the prestige of Al Qaeda, perceived within jihadi circles as a fairly marginal organization.

This has largely backfired. But it’s important to always bear in mind that attacks on the United States, especially by sensational methods like airplane bombings, are for terror groups essentially PR stunts whose value is ultimately instrumental. They don’t do it for the sheer love of blowing up planes; they do it as a means of establishing their own domestic credibility vis a vis more locally-focused Islamist groups (violent and peaceful) with whom they are competing for recruits. While our response to these attempts will often necessarily have some military component, there is no reason to bolster their outreach efforts by making a big public show of treating Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as tantamount to a belligerent foreign state.  Better, when it’s compatible with our intelligence gathering and security goals, to treat Abdulmutallab and his cohorts as just one more band of thugs.

Wars, Crimes, and Underpants Bombers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in McDonald v. Chicago — the Second Amendment case with implications far beyond gun rights.  The Court is quite likely to extend the right to keep and bear arms to the states and thereby invalidate the Chicago handgun ban at issue, but the way in which it does so could revolutionize constitutional law.

In response to the oppression of freed slaves and abolitionists in southern and border states after the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters sought to protect individual rights from infringement by state and local governments.  The amendment’s Due Process Clause and Privileges or Immunities Clause provided overlapping but distinct protections for these rights.  The Court decided in the 1873 Slaughter-House Cases, however, that the Privileges or Immunities Clause only protected Americans’ rights as national, not state, citizens.  This reactionary holding eviscerated the clause, rendering it powerless to protect individual rights from state interference.

McDonald provides the Court an opportunity to overturn the Slaughter-House Cases and finally restore the Privileges or Immunities Clause to its proper role as a check against government intrusion on individual rights.  Doing so would secure Americans’ natural rights, such as the freedom of contract and the right to earn an honest living, without enabling judges to invent constitutional rights to health care or welfare payments.  For a more detailed discussion of McDonald’s potential implications, and how the Court should rule, see my recent op-ed here.

I will also be participating in several public events this week on McDonald, the Fourteenth Amendment, and firearm regulation.  Today at 4:00 p.m., I will be speaking at a Cato policy forum, which will be broadcast live on C-SPAN and which you may watch online here.  Tomorrow at 3:30 p.m., I will participate in a post-argument discussion of McDonald at the Georgetown University Law Center, which event is cosponsored by the Federalist Society and the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy (where Josh Blackman and I recently published a lengthy article on the subject).  And on Wednesday at noon, I will be participating in a Cato Capitol Hill briefing on McDonald and the future of gun rights at the Rayburn House Office Building, room B-340 (more information here).

Using Guns to Protect Liberty is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog