Author: Ethan Blevins

Legal silences

Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty , , , , , , , ,

In law, there are different silences.

When lawmakers set out to establish legal standards, they inevitably don’t address every contingency. There are spaces for flexibility, for breadth of application, for unforeseen developments, for the careful discretion required for sound law enforcement. There are always gaps.

Yet the gaps raise serious questions. Foremost among these is the problem of delegated lawmaking power. The United States Constitution vests the legislative power in a bicameral congress. Exclusively. Yet gaps, though inevitable and sometimes desirable, can result in leaks of this exclusive authority to non-legislative actors–police, prosecutors, juries, regulators, etc.

Take a classic example, when the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 gave the President authority to make”codes of fair competition” for slaughterhouses and other industries. That was more than a gap–that was a gulf. It’s one of only two laws that the U.S. Supreme Court has ever invalidated as an unconstitutional delegation of lawmaking authority to a non-legislative actor.

But at what point does a crack become a crevasse? During Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing, Senator Al Franken mocked the notion that any line should be drawn at all: “When Congress passes laws that require agencies to implement them, … those agencies turn to experts to develop those policies …. And I think that is a good thing. We want experts doing the work. What we Senators do not want to be doing is deciding … what the distance in the slats are in a baby’s crib.”

As with most statements made by politicians in confirmation hearings (or most anywhere else), Franken tilts at a straw man. But his example helps to highlight different types of legislative silence. On one hand, Franken is of course correct–a legislature needn’t and probably shouldn’t become entangled in minutiae.

But Franken fails to see that there are different kinds of silence. On the one hand, permissible gaps to be filled in by agencies and law enforcers involve conditional lawmaking where a certain legal requirement hinges on delegated fact-finding responsibilities. I’m a bit skeptical that we want Congress legislating safety standards for baby cribs, but let’s run with Franken’s example anyway. Congress might pass a law that requires crib manufacturers to ensure that crib slats do not pose a serious safety risk to occupants. It can leave an agency to determine the exact distance between crib slats requisite for child safety because the agency is making a factual determination (again, I’m not sure we need or want regulators doing this but bear with me). We’ll call this crib-slat silence.

Crib-slat silence is not an unlawful delegation of lawmaking authority. It simply commits to federal agencies the fact-finding responsibilities already inherent in the executive branch’s duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Crib-slat silence is different in kind from an unlawful delegation of lawmaking power. An agency is doing something quite different when it sets a safety standard for crib slats than when it establishes “codes of fair competition.” It isn’t simply a difference in the size of the silence; it’s a silence of a different kind altogether. Take, for instance, how President Roosevelt put together “codes of fair competition” under the broad power given him by the National Industrial Recovery Act. He let New York poultry butchers do it for him. Anyone with a basic understanding of public choice theory can appreciate how a business allowed to write the law that governs its competitors might go about this task.

To no one’s surprise, the codes of fair competition made life harder for minority business owners, in particular kosher butchers. Specifically, the code prohibited butchers from letting customers select the specific chicken they wanted–a part of at least some kosher practices in New York at the that time. The Schechters brothers, who ran a kosher butcher shop, were criminally indicted for letting a customer select an “unfit” chicken, among other things. The Supreme Court held this to be an unlawful delegation of lawmaking authority because the National Industrial Recovery Act didn’t just make application of a particular law contingent on executive fact-finding–it delegated the policy choices inherent in the legislative power. This type of silence we’ll call Schechter silence.

Schechter silence and crib-slat silence aren’t just different in terms of the relative size of the gap. Take, for instance, an example of a smaller instance of Schechter silence, where the silence is not quite so huge as “codes of fair competition,” but still has the essential quality of letting the agency make policy choices rather than find facts. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers share regulatory responsibility over the Clean Water Act. The Army Corps has statutory authority to issue permits for polluting protected water bodies, and the EPA has statutory authority to veto those permits, even after they’ve been issued, if the EPA decides that the permitted activity will have an “unacceptable adverse effect” on the environment. The statute hasn’t delegated the authority to create a regulatory code from whole cloth, but it has delegated authority to make normative judgment calls, not just executive fact-finding. Determining whether a certain adverse effect is “unacceptable” is unavoidably subjective and calls for much more than establishing the existence of certain objective facts. “Unacceptable” involves the weighing of various competing interests–economic, environmental, etc.–and making a judgment, not based on facts, but on agency policy preferences. Note also, that the EPA can decline to veto the permit even if it does find an adverse effect to be unacceptable. Hence, while the EPA’s veto authority isn’t especially sweeping in its effect, it still is an exercise of legislative power.

On the other hand, crib-slat silence can authorize executive acts of great national significance, like tariff rates. In 1928, an importer challenged the president’s statutory authority to set tariffs as a delegation of legislative power. But the statute at issue required the president to set such rates based on a variety of factual determinations–not on what the president considered appropriate in his own judgment.

There’s yet a third silence. Rather than interstitial gaps in statutory language, this thrid silence is the vacuum where Congress has chosen not to speak at all. Sometimes, courts and agencies have mistaken this silence for crib-slat silence. That mistake can be a serious problem for the structure of sound government.

One example is the Department of Labor’s regulation of “tip pooling.” The Fair Labor Standards Act establishes federal minimum wage law. The law allows businesses to set their wages below the default minimum if the businesses use a “tip credit”–the deficit between the wage and the legal minimum is filled in with the employee’s tip money.  If a business elects to use the tip credit, that business is prohibited from divvying up tip money among staff–you earn it, you keep it.

But the statute says nothing about prohibitions on tip-pooling for businesses that don’t take a tip credit. The Department of Labor didn’t like tip pooling, so it decided that the statute’s silence about tip pooling for non-tip-credit businesses was a delegation to the agency to do as it pleased. The Department of Labor promulgated a rule that extended the tip-pooling rule to all businesses, whether or not they took a tip credit. Incredibly, a federal court of appeals for the Ninth Circuit said this rule was just fine.

The silence extending outward from the edges of a statute are bookends, not blank pages.  Hence, I’ll call this third silence bookend silence. The idea that an agency can simply promulgate rules to fill up this endless silence destroys our system of separated powers. After all, the clear implication of allowing the Department of Labor to fill in that silence is that the executive branch of government has a boundless and inherent law-making authority that can only be circumscribed if Congress expressly tells the executive branch “no.” This is essentially a reversal of the first two articles of the Constitution, vesting the Executive with lawmaking authority and Congress with what amounts to no more than a glorified veto. Yet this is precisely what the largest appellate court in the country allows.

There’s no doubt, of course, that the Executive does have some inherent authority to act without legislative imprimatur, in areas like foreign affairs. But those are expressly granted powers, or they’re necessarily implied. For instance, the duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed necessarily implies the ability to hire staff, promulgate regulations for managing staff , law enforcement practices, etc. This is all quite different than filling in bookend silence, a free-floating power to extend statutory prohibitions beyond the express scope laid out by Congress, simply on the basis that Congress hadn’t said “here and no farther.”

In law as in life, silence can be a virtue. But federal agencies can turn it into a vice. That depends on the kind of silence we’re talking about. Conflation of crib-slat silence and Schechter silence or bookend silence has resulted in a flaccid judicial response to delegations of lawmaking authority. It would help if courts acknowledged distinctions between the types of silence statutes exhibit.

Religious speech gets shorted again

Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty , , ,

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition asking whether a transit authority can reject a Christmas ad for display on its buses just because the ad is religious. This is an easy question, and it’s a shame the Court denied the petition. Justices Gorsuch and Thomas, though, did write a short consolation prize, saying what they would have said if they granted the case: namely, the government can’t discriminate against a religious viewpoint on a topic while allowing other non-religious viewpoints.

The sides of buses are a frequent and heated battleground for free speech. Transit authorities often draw revenue by selling blank space on their buses. In this case, Archdiocese of Washington v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the Catholic Church tried to place a Christmas ad on D.C. buses with the silhouettes of a few shepherds and the phrase “Find the Perfect Gift.” The transit authority rejected the ad.

    The key fact here was that the transit authority allowed other ads about Christmas. All the parties, and the various courts, agreed that Christmas has a “secular” component and a “religious” component. Hence, Wal-Mart and Macy’s and every other retailer could slap their ads on buses across the metropolitan area clamoring about how to celebrate the holiday (by buying their stuff). But a religious advertiser could not express their views on how to celebrate the holiday in that same space, the only difference being the religious nature of the content.

    The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated in other settings that similar restrictions constitute viewpoint discrimination. If the government allows speech on a particular subject matter, it cannot then restrict speech on that topic simply because the viewpoint is religious. That’s true even if the proposed speech drips with religious sentiment–such sentiment deserves equal footing under the First Amendment.

    This isn’t to say that D.C. buses can now be overrun with religious zealotry. D.C. could lawfully limit advertisements to only commercial ads (they don’t). And of course they could always just forego the revenue and say no ads at all. But if the government opens up a space for expression, it must do so even-handedly.

    Seattle’s landlord regs at the Supreme Court

    Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty , , , ,

    Landlords in Seattle must rent to the first person to walk in the door, so long as they check out on paper. This “first-in-time” rule has slogged through several years of litigation over whether the rule violates landlords’ constitutional rights (full disclosure–I represent the plaintiffs). That case, called Yim v. City of Seattle, has now crescendoed with a petition to the United States Supreme Court. The Court should seize the chance to decide two pressing questions about the Constitution’s role in protecting property rights: (1) if regulation destroys a fundamental attribute of property ownership–like the right to exclude, or the right to sell–does the regulation result in a taking that requires compensation? and (2) if a regulation is “unduly oppressive” of individual rights, does it violate due process?

    The first-in-time rule is something of a novelty. The rationale behind the rule is to prevent implicit bias; a landlord can’t unconsciously discriminate if she doesn’t have any discretion to decide whom to rent to. Hence, the rule allows landlords to set pre-established criteria, though all criteria must have minimum thresholds (i.e., minimum credit score). The landlord cannot thereafter deviate from that criteria and must simply rent to the first person who qualifies, even if ten or fifteen applicants check all the boxes. After the landlord rents to the first comer, the lucky winner has 48 hours to sit on the offer, after which time the offer moves on to the next person in line.

    The bottom line is that landlords can no longer make common-sense judgment calls about who will live on their property. The practical challenges that result are daunting, for small landlords in particular. A landlord cannot, for instance, deny an applicant because they feel threatened or unsafe when an applicant tours a unit. That’s a big deal for plaintiff Kelly Lyles, a single woman and sexual assault survivor. Or for MariLyn Yim, who owns a triplex and lives in one of the units with her husband and kids. They share a yard and common spaces with their tenants–compatibility and safety are key. And some of the Yims’ units have roommates, where the ability to select people that will get along and feel comfortable with each other is essential. But basic discretion is out the window with first-in-time. If Lois Lane advertises the fortress of solitude for rent and Lex Luthor shows up with his spotless credit score and seven-digit income, she’s out of luck.

    And renting property often involves a give-and-take negotiation that’s no longer possible under the rule. Tom Riddle’s credit score is shabby, but he offers a two-year lease instead of one to make his application more appealing. Not under first-in-time. Pam Isley offers to do landscaping if the landlord drops rent by $50 a month. Nope. Nor can landlords offer leniency by deviating from their criteria because they want to give a second chance to someone down-and-out.

    MariLyn Yim and Kelly Lyles sued on the theory that removing everyday discretion in this manner constitutes an unconstitutional taking and a violation of due process. They won at trial and lost before the Washington Supreme Court. Now, the questions they bring to the Supreme Court’s attention raise some fundamental questions about the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause and the Fourteenth Amendment due process guarantee.

    The plaintiffs argue that a taking occurs when regulation destroys a fundamental attribute of property ownership. They invoke a well-known metaphor in property law: the “bundle of sticks.” Property is not really a single right–it’s a bundle of various rights that a person has with respect to a physical thing, such as the right to exclude others, the right to use the property, to occupy it, to sell it, and so on. Plaintiff’s theory is that each of these “sticks” in the bundle is entitled to independent constitutional protection; when one of those sticks is destroyed by regulation, that constitutes a taking of property as surely as a seizure of land. In this case, plaintiffs argue that denying them the right to decide who will occupy their property destroys their right to sell property to the person of their choosing and their right to exclude people not of their choosing.

    This is an important and uncertain question under the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court has held in the past that a taking occurred where various attributes of property ownership were destroyed. For instance, when the United States required a marina to open a private lagoon to the public, the Supreme Court held a taking occurred because the government had destroyed the right to exclude, “one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property.” Likewise, the Supreme Court held that a taking occurred when Congress prohibited owners of tribal lands to pass on the property to their heirs, which was a “total abrogation” of a right that “has been part of the Anglo-American legal system since feudal times.”

    The trouble is, though, that some other decisions of the Supreme Court can be read to refute this approach to takings. Hence, the city of Seattle argues that these takings precedents don’t represent the current state of takings law. This question thus presents an important opportunity for the Court to clarify the scope and meaning of the Fifth Amendment.

    The second issue is no less compelling: does the oppressive impact of a law bear on whether it satisfies due process? The federal courts tend to answer yes, while a large number of state courts answer no. The Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause imposes, at minimum, a floor of rationality–a law must be rationally related to a legitimate government interest. The question raised in the Yim petition asks the Court to address whether an unduly oppressive means (obliterating discretion) of achieving a legitimate government purpose (preventing discrimination) satisfies this threshold of rationality. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that a law’s oppressive nature bears on whether the law is arbitrary or irrational. That is, a government has no legitimate interest in imposing oppressive laws on its people, and the use of oppression to achieve an otherwise legitimate government interest is arbitrary and irrational, in violation of due process.

    The Washington Supreme Court, however, held that the U.S. Supreme Court had implicitly overruled this “unduly oppressive” analysis. It also overruled a whopping 61 of its own cases recognizing and applying this “unduly oppressive” test–so many that it provided a separate index of cases fed through the shredder. By joining a growing number of states that refuse to recognize that an unduly oppressive law violates the rational basis test required by due process, the Washington Supreme Court has teed up an important issue that warrants the U.S. Supreme Court’s attention.

    These questions will grow in significance as government control of the rental market expands. Since enacting first-in-time, for instance, Seattle has imposed a ban on criminal background checks, a ban on winter evictions, a requirement that landlords rent to a tenant’s choice of roommate, and more. Other cities are enacting similar restrictions on landlord control over their own property. The U.S. Supreme Court should address the pressing constitutional questions that such regulations raise.

    Coronavirus and takings

    Ethan Blevins Current Events, Law, Liberty, Politics , , ,

    City governments are flirting with a ban on evictions during the coronavirus pandemic. I doubt, however, that doing so comports with the Constitution’s takings clause or, perhaps, the contracts clause.

    San Jose has introduced legislation that will ban evictions due to un/underemployment resulting from coronavirus. Seattle’s socialist firebrand, Kshama Sawant, calls for similar action. Her letter, though, betrays the truth behind many proposed emergency measures–she’s leveraging the crisis to further her political agenda, particularly her hatred of capitalism. In the letter, she froths: “The status quo under capitalism is deeply hostile to the majority of working people, and it would be unconscionable to place the further burden of the Coronavirus crisis on those who are already the most economically stressed.” Never mind that the status quo in the absence of capitalism would be grinding poverty.

    But, in any case, the proposal to ban evictions and force landlords to renew leases as the pandemic sweeps across the states raises serious constitutional concerns. Even in times of crisis, observance of constitutional norms remains essential. In part, this is because laws passed as emergency measures tend to hang about long after the emergency subsides. New York rent control began as a wartime measure, for instance, and that curse still plagues the New York rental market. The other reason, of course, is that the Constitution is built for just these moments. The pressure to invade rights, after all, comes when things are not going well. As Justice Sutherland once put it, “If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch, as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned.”

    Forcing landlords to either renew leases or forego eviction for lease violations likely raises at least two constitutional problems: takings and impairment of contractual obligations. While such laws don’t literally seize property, they effectively impose a servitude on landlords’ property, stripping them of control over the disposition and occupation of their land. When an essential attribute of property ownership is destroyed by regulation in this manner, the government must offer compensation. We already know this compensation requirement applies during national emergencies. During World War II, for instance, the Supreme Court held that the United States had to compensate property owners and leaseholders when it temporarily seized factories for wartime production.

    The contract clause problem is also straightforward: barring landlords from enforcing lease terms impairs obligations under pre-existing contracts. The contracts clause, though, has been severely undermined in recent decades, such that a showing of a compelling interest like mitigating the impact of the pandemic may well satisfy the flaccid demands of the modern contracts clause.

    It may seem profoundly harsh to impose constitutional constraints on governments trying to resolve a crisis. But three things ought to be kept in mind.

    First, an emergency certainly means that some will face a heavy burden, but that fact tells us nothing about how that burden should be allocated. Why should landlords bear the costs? Indeed, As the Supreme Court said in Armstrong v. United States, the takings clause exists to avoid imposing societal burdens on specific individuals: “The Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that private property shall not be taken for a public use without just compensation was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole.”

    Second, we should keep in mind that lease agreements already account for risk. That’s baked into the price and terms that give rise to a mutually agreeable arrangement between parties. To simply allow one party to slip out of the terms of the lease distorts that arrangement.

    Third, the takings clause does not bar emergency measures, including the seizure of property, but only upon just compensation. No exigency should excuse cities like San Jose or Seattle from compensating for the costs they’re hoisting upon landlords. And in the case of the contracts clause, the government could still honor existing leases by acting as a guarantor for tenants who can’t pay the rent.

    All of these points apply to a world in which landlords do not voluntarily exercise leniency. But I think we’ll find that most landlords are forgiving during a temporary crisis. Most landlords have an extreme aversion to evicting tenants–it’s the nightmare, last-ditch option that they try hard to avoid. That, plus the simple dose of compassion that many landlords will feel inspired to offer, may do more toward helping see us through than any emergency measures.

    More campaign-finance fiction

    Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty, Politics , ,

    Today, Jacobin reports on Bernie Sanders’ proposal to give each American a $50-$200 voucher to spend on politicians’ political campaigns. I’m the lead counsel challenging a similar voucher program in Seattle, so I have some feelings on this subject.

    The article opens with this classic ipse dixit: “Everyone knows that rich people skew our political priorities through big-money donations to candidates.” Really? I didn’t know that. But of course this is the big assumption behind so much campaign-finance hype, one that is vague and unprovable, like all good political rhetoric.

    My first question here would be an attempt to resolve an ambiguity: what does “skew” mean? Where’s the magical baseline of “unskewed” political priorities? That baseline does not and never has existed. This opening line also fails to account for causation. That is, do donations influence eventual votes, or are both donations and votes attracted to candidate strength? I’ve yet to see a convincing argument that donations have ever “bought” a major federal election.

    The article also seems to assume, as many do, that liberal politicians are the ones losing out in the big-donor world. This just isn’t so. Candidates from across the political spectrum receive plenty of cash. Heck, Hillary outspent Trump 3 to 1 in 2016. If she was hoping her donors would “buy” her the election, she was sorely disappointed.

    The article also parrots the frequent refrain about our “broken” campaign-finance system. Again, compared to what? Where’s the unbroken system and what does it look like? At the end of the day, politicians need to figure out how to appeal to voters with all that money. How are our politics “skewed” if both parties are receiving plenty of funding with which to present a message that draws votes?

    As for the actual voucher proposal, I think most Americans would rather keep their $50-$200 dollars and spend it on something other than a politician, but that’s just a hunch.

    Ban on inquiries into wage history upheld

    Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty

    I haven’t read the decision in much depth yet, but the Third Circuit Court of Appeals this week upheld a Philadelphia ban on employer inquiries into job applicants’ wage history.

    This is part of a troubling trend. More and more governments are banning inquiries into information that they don’t want people to use. Seattle and other cities have begun banning criminal background checks by landlords. Portland is set to pass a law that bans landlords from asking about a person’s immigration status. Other municipalities have passed and likely will pass more laws banning inquiries into wage history. The Third Circuit opinion will make it much harder to challenge this kind of speech restriction.

    The Third Circuit decision held that the wage inquiry ban should be subject to the “commercial speech” test. In First Amendment jurisprudence, courts are more forgiving of restrictions on commercial speech than other types of speech. This doctrine, however, is meant to be reserved for advertisements, not any speech that happens to be related to a possible transaction. Here, the Third Circuit extended the rule to include questions asked in the context of an anticipated transaction–an employment contract. This is an unfortunate expansion of a doctrine that arguably shouldn’t exist at all. The First Amendment doesn’t distinguish between commercial and other types of speech, and neither should the courts.

    The problem of value in regulatory takings

    Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty , , ,

    Regulatory takings law is a mess. The Fifth Amendment promises: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” This constitutional mandate encompasses direct acquisition of property, government action that damages or restricts property, and regulation of property that effectively results in a taking. Defining what constitutes a regulatory taking has vexed the courts for decades.

    I believe much of the trouble comes from the Supreme Court’s fixation on loss of value. The primary test for a regulatory taking looks to reasonable investment-backed expectations dashed by the regulation (i.e., I’d amassed resources and did a lot of footwork to build a house, but a new shoreline buffer prohibits construction), the resulting economic loss, and the character of the government action.

    Examining value creates intractable line-drawing problems and fails to establish a predictable rule. How much loss of value is too much? As one might expect, courts come out with wildly different answers, though all of them tend to lean toward not requiring compensation. A Massachusetts court, for example, recently held that a regulation that forbade any development on a parcel of land and resulted in a 91.5% loss of property value was not a taking that requires the government to compensate the property owner.

    Hence, no one going into court with a takings claim really has any way to predict what a court might do, though it’s safe to guess that the result will be bad. Courts are reluctant to draw a line in the sand, so they just hand wins to the government. This is not to say that loss of value is wholly irrelevant, of course, but it’s more relevant to the question of how much compensation is due, not whether a taking has occurred in the first place.

    Takings law doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, nineteenth-century takings law took a totally different approach. Early courts looked to the burden on the property interest, not the loss of economic value. Most fledgling regulatory takings law developed in the state courts, for two reasons: the Fifth Amendment wasn’t applied against the states until the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, and the federal government in the nineteenth century wasn’t much in the business of regulating land.

    The early state cases didn’t even consider economic loss in their approach to what constitutes a taking. For instance, in Woodruff v. Neal, an 1859 Connecticut case, a government granted ranchers licenses to graze their cattle on public rights of way that crossed over private land. The private landowners sued for a taking and won because their property rights included rights over the “herbage” that the cows ate. The economic loss had to have been puny, but the court didn’t even bother addressing this, probably because they saw economic loss as pertinent only to the question of compensation due.

    Most of the other regulatory takings cases of that time period involved riparian rights–wharfage rights and so on. So it was with one of the United States Supreme Court’s early forays into regulatory takings–a case where, like the state cases that preceded it, did not even bother to mention loss of value. The case was Yates v. Milwaukee (1870). Yates owned land adjacent to a river and had built a wharf that extended out into the water. The city didn’t like his wharf, so they declared it a nuisance and sought to tear it down. Yates argued this was a regulatory taking, and the Supreme Court agreed. They didn’t bother to mention how much the loss of the wharf would cost Yates. They just held that access to a river was among the rights held by owners of a riverbank. The city had destroyed that right, so a taking occurred and compensation was due.

    Strangely, seven years later, the Supreme Court started to retreat from regulatory takings altogether and didn’t really return to the doctrine until the early twentieth century. Much later, when the Supreme Court thought up its value-based regulatory takings test in a 1978 case called Penn Central v. City of New York, the Court completely ignored Yates and all the many non-value-based takings cases in the state courts of the nineteenth century. In fact, the Court seemed to believe that regulatory takings law was a twentieth-century creation that began with a 1920 case called Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon. This bizarre blindness to the real history of regulatory takings law has resulted in an incomprehensible labyrinth of takings jurisprudence. The Supreme Court could learn a few lessons from the state courts of two centuries ago.

    Climate crisis or censorship crisis?

    Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , ,

    Yesterday, the Chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis wrote an ominous letter to the CEO of Google. For the second time, the Chair is leaning on Google to police and remove “dangerous climate misinformation” on YouTube. The letter doesn’t threaten direct legal action against Google, but it nonetheless raises serious concern because it runs so counter to the free speech tradition and the value of a robust internet.

    According to the Chair, “YouTube has been driving millions of viewers to climate misinformation videos every day, a shocking revelation that runs contrary to Google’s important missions of fighting misinformation and promoting climate action.” The Chair states her own unequivocal commitment to “promoting ambitious federal policy that will … eliminate barriers to action, including those as pervasive and harmful as climate denial and climate misinformation.” It’s hard not to see the veiled threat here.

    Note the letter’s subtle casting of the consumers of information as passive actors that must be protected, rather than rational actors who choose what information to consume, a choice they’re entitled to make. She says “YouTube has been driving millions of viewers to climate misinformation” and that Google should “correct the record for millions of users who have been exposed to climate misinformation.” This language strips accountability and action from the viewers, as if they are a captive audience held down and forced to view climate denial videos with eyelid clamps like a scene from A Clockwork Orange. But if that content is promoted and viewed, that’s because there’s a consumer demand for it. The passive language used in the letter exemplifies the paternalism that often lurks behind censorship: for their own welfare, we must protect the public from information they wish to consume.

    Note also the absolutism woven into the letter. Google cannot both be committed to climate action and committed to an open culture of public discourse. In the war for humanity’s survival, one priority must dominate above all others.

    The letter also relies on the tired tactic of impugning speakers’ motives. Anyone who expresses “climate misinformation” on YouTube just wants “to protect polluters and their profits at the expense of the American people.” It’s impossible for an absolutist to consider that views opposed to her own might be sincerely held. Plus, research has shown that political views frequently do not line up with individual self-interest. Only a shallow thinker or someone with an agenda assumes a political viewpoint is rooted in a selfish motive.

    As for the constitutional implications of the letter, there is no question that the federal government cannot impose on Google the duty to remove “climate misinformation” or “climate denial” content. False speech is not exiled from the sanctuary of First Amendment protection. Of course, some false speech can be penalized, such as libel, slander, or fraud. But these are circumstances where there’s some other legally cognizable harm associated with the false statement for which recovery is warranted. There is no general rule that false speech is unprotected.

    Government should never be in the position of arbitrating truth. Particularly in the context of hotly debated political controversies, allowing government to label one side as gospel and penalize dissidents opens the door to legally enshrined orthodoxy. As Justice Robert Jackson said 80 years ago: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” That’s what the power to ban “climate misinformation” entails.

    Indeed, government refereeing of truth will almost always shade toward discrimination against disfavored viewpoints. For example, there is “misinformation” out there on both sides of the climate debate. Those who peddle wild doomsday predictions are just as unhinged as those denying the realities of climate change. Yet the Chair does not propose to censor such misinformation.

    When I see such zealous effort to shut someone up, I can’t help but ask myself why the censor is so afraid. The targeting of this speech is likely only draw attention to it. Why worry about the hacks? I’ve always believed what John Milton expressed centuries ago in the Areopagitica: “Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” Of course, that doesn’t mean that falsehoods lack convincing power, but truth in the end has the edge. Rather than pick the winner in advance, we do much better by letting truth emerge through open debate, bloodied but victorious.

    Supreme Court hears vital freedom-of-religion case

    Ethan Blevins Current Events, Law, Liberty, Religion , , , , ,

    Today, the Supreme Court heard  the most important case on the intersection of religion and education to arise in decades–Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. A few years back, Montana had passed its first school-choice program, a tax-credit scheme that allowed a small tax credit for donations to scholarship programs that helped kids afford private school.

    As in any state, many of Montana’s private schools are religious. Right after the state legislature passed the tax-credit statute, the Montana Department of Revenue promulgated a rule that immediately gutted the program by forbidding students attending religious schools from receiving scholarship money.

    The Department based its rule on Montana’s Constitution, which says the legislature can’t “make any direct or indirect appropriation or payment from any public fund or monies . . . for any sectarian purpose or to aid any church, school,” etc. Plenty of states have very similar “no-aid” clauses. Revenue claimed that scholarships for religious students under the tax-credit scheme violated the “no-aid” clause.

    It’s worth taking a moment to consider how bizarre this argument is. These scholarships are funded by private donations–the money never enters a public coffer. Yet Revenue thinks such donations would constitute state aid to religion because the donor gets a tiny tax credit (up to $150) for the donation. Underlying this argument is the strange notion that any money the government declines to collect from you is still the government’s money.  This would mean, for instance, that every charitable donation eligible for a tax deduction would likewise constitute a government appropriation. Revenue’s argument has always looked to me like an extremely weak pretext for blatant discrimination against religious students.

    So Kendra Espinoza and a few other parents with kids at religious schools sued the Department of Revenue, claiming, among other things, that Revenue’s rule violated their free exercise of religion under the First Amendment. Kendra won at trial, and then lost spectacularly at the Montana Supreme Court. In fact, the Montana Supreme Court did something even worse than the Department of Revenue–it invalidated the entire tax-credit program, such that even students at secular private schools could no longer receive scholarship assistance.

    Thankfully, the Supreme Court took up the case, and they heard oral argument today. (My colleagues and I filed an amicus brief with the Court in support of Kendra).

    The oral argument transcript shows a Court divided along the typical ideological lines. The liberal justices seemed preoccupied with standing–whether the petitioners had the right to sue. One justice implied that only taxpayers (who have a financial interest because of the tax credit) and schools (who receive the scholarship money) should have the right to sue. This is a weird take, given that families and students are obviously the intended beneficiaries of the scholarship program.

    A number of the justices discussed a odd quirk about the Montana Supreme Court’s decision. The basic question they raised is this: since the Montana Supreme Court took the scholarship program away from everyone, are petitioners now being treated equally? But the sole reason the Montana Supreme Court struck down the program was to prevent religious students from receiving scholarship. A government action taken for a discriminatory reason is, well, discriminatory. If the legislature had excluded religious students when it enacted the program, the program would still stand. And if the legislature tried to enact the same program, providing equal treatment to religious and secular students alike, the Court would strike it down. That’s discrimination based on religious status–pretty straightforward.

    One justice cited to James Madison’s famous Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, arguing that the founders wouldn’t have wanted public funds flowing to religious schools like this (again no public funds were flowing to Montana religious schools under this program, but why let accuracy get in the way of a good narrative). That’s a terrible misreading of Madison. The Memorial and Remonstrance was an attack on preferential aid to religion, not to a program that provided public benefits to all groups, including religious ones. The difference is vital. Can the government deny churches police protection, fire protection, sewer connections, electrical service, or any other public benefit on the grounds that the government would be providing indirect public funding to religious institutions? Surely not. In fact, that’s exactly what the Supreme Court said in a recent case called Trinity Lutheran, where Missouri denied a church daycare access to a government program that helped renovate playgrounds.

    There is a difference between Trinity Lutheran and this case, arguably, which is that here the money goes more directly to religious indoctrination, not something secular like playground materials. But at bottom, public funding is fungible. Providing police protection and other general public benefits obviously makes it easier for a religious institution to fulfill its religious mission.

    This case should be an easy one. The government offered a benefit to all private schools. To include religious schools doesn’t “establish” religion. It just treats religious groups equally, as the Constitution requires.

    A happy ten-year anniversary to the case people love to hate

    Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty, Politics , ,

    This month marks the ten-year anniversary of one of the most despised and misunderstood Supreme Court cases: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

    I love Citizens United. It stands as perhaps the most important First Amendment decision of the last decade. Yet it’s come to symbolize the illicit marriage between money and power, while what actually happened in the case is largely an afterthought. I remember encountering an enraged signature-gatherer outside a Trader Joe’s a few years ago who was engaged in one of the many campaigns to amend the Constitution to put an end to Citizens United. I thought he might have a coronary when I told him that it was one of my favorite Supreme Court decisions. I deeply regret not asking him if he could rehearse for me the facts of the case. Maybe he would’ve surprised me.

    So what did Citizens United actually say? The law at issue banned corporations from using general treasury funds for electioneering, with civil and criminal penalties for corporations that spent money to speak on pressing political issues of the day. The Supreme Court said that a small-time political organization (that happened to be incorporated), Citizens United, could not be banned from publishing a film critical of a presidential candidate. It’s hard to find speech of a higher order of significance than that.

    Citizens United held that government cannot ban political expenditures just because people choose to speak through the corporate form. This is a classic example of an old rule–government cannot censor speech based on the identity of the speaker.

    Much of the fury over Citizens United is premised on a guttural abhorrence for the corporation. But corporations are just groups of people who have chosen to organize through a particular structure. And most don’t realize that the law at issue in Citizens United also banned unions from using general treasury funds for electioneering communications.

    Much of the popular criticism of the case that I’ve seen seems to believe that Citizens United was the first case to establish that corporations had First Amendment rights. It wasn’t. In fact, not even the dissenters in the case would’ve held that corporations lack such rights. That was an uncontroversial and settled matter. And it should be obvious as to why. If corporations don’t have First Amendment rights, then the New York Times doesn’t have First Amendment rights, along with many other media organizations. (I’ve heard the excuse that freedom of the press would still protect media organizations independently, which is a misunderstanding of the freedom of the press, which doesn’t offer greater speech protections to media than non-media).

    Citizens United gets a bad break, and I wish it a happy anniversary.

    A blatant campaign-finance boondoggle

    Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty, Politics ,

    The City of Seattle is poised to pass a plainly unconstitutional campaign-finance law later this month. The bill would limit contributions to political action committees that are not controlled by or connected to a candidate to $5000 per election cycle. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which would govern the outcome of any litigation, has already said several times that limiting contributions to independent PACs (meaning independent of a candidate’s campaign) violates the First Amendment.

    The rationale is pretty straightforward. Any limit on political spending is a limit on speech, so it must satisfy the First Amendment. In Buckley v. Valeo, the United States Supreme Court said that contribution limits directly to candidates are usually okay because they (arguably) reduce the likelihood of corrupt quid pro quo exchanges between candidates and donors. But Buckley struck down limits on independent expenditures (meaning expenditures that aren’t donated to a candidate but speak independently for or against a candidate). Independent expenditures, unlike direct contributions, are not coordinated or controlled by the candidate, so there is less of a risk that an independent expenditure is actually an illicit quid pro quo. Since limits on independent expenditures restrict speech without actually doing anything to prevent corruption, they violate the First Amendment.

    Contributions to PACs that engage in independent expenditures are basically the same as independent expenditures–there isn’t a direct connection to a candidate, so there simply is no genuine risk of corruption. The City of Seattle probably knows this, and they either don’t care or they hope to change the state of the law. I look forward to the forthcoming judicial rebuke.

    Really, I find the entire premise behind limits on either contributions or expenditures to be highly dubious. While there are no doubt a few instances where a contribution to a candidate is given in direct exchange for some future favor once the candidate wins office, the vast majority of contributions are not that. They’re donations to support a candidate because his platform reflects the donor’s policy preferences. Most corrupt exchanges of money, when they do occur, almost certainly occur under the table and outside the context of highly regulated campaign contributions. Thus, contribution limits penalize a wide range of legitimate political speech to get at a vanishingly small (and unknowable) number of malefactors.

    Defenders of campaign-finance laws tend to emphasize the huge amount of political spending as per se evidence of the need for reform. (When you compare the amount of political spending to other spending in the economy, it becomes quite clear that the amount of money in electoral politics simply isn’t that much). This claim that money in elections is fundamentally bad has always struck me as bizarre. That money is spent by both sides on political speech that informs the public. Why should we assume that this is a bad thing? Of course all political speech has a partisan aim–to convince voters to vote for so-and-so. But the information hardly compels voters to do so. At the end of the day, it seems much better to have a public informed by politically motivated communications than to have less information.

    Campaign-finance advocates also like to point out that candidates who receive the most money tend to win. Again, it isn’t obvious why this is a bad thing. It seems rather obvious that popular candidates will attract both dollars and votes, not because they get lots of money, but because they’re popular. This is a classic failure to acknowledge the difference between correlation and causation. To date, no significant evidence has surfaced demonstrating that dollars cause votes.

    And what about the concern over undue influence? Of course, politicians may be responsive to high-dollar donors. But again, this is a correlation issue. The NRA gives money to candidates who support the NRA’s  policy preferences. When the candidate reaches office and fights gun control, is it because of the NRA’s support, or was the NRA’s support prompted by the candidate’s pre-existing policy platform? Over and over, the deeply felt convictions of campaign-finance advocates seem to rest on a house of cards.

    In any case, even if risk of quid pro quo corruption is a valid reason to restrict speech, Seattle’s bill goes well beyond that rationale. PACs engage in core political speech, as do the individuals who donate to them. That speech merits protection.

    The mythology of Lochner v. New York

    Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty , , , , , ,

    In the highly competitive world of most misunderstood Supreme Court decisions, Lochner v. New York sits high on the list. The reason is simple enough: it has undergone a transcendent ascent to the world of abstraction, where it now embodies the platonic essence of a black-robed cadre of old, straight, white men hankering to smash the plebeian’s face in the dirt.

    Yesterday, the Intelligencer–a publication of New York Magazine–dragged out these old tropes with the galumphing rhetoric typical of someone simply parroting a battered playbook with no real concern for its accuracy. The article is entitled, “Conservatives Want a ‘Republic’ to Protect Privileges.” Its basic premise is to push back against the anti-democratic tendencies of those who oppose direct, untrammeled democracy.

    The article lists several “limitations on democracy to justify and even expand privilege.” The second references the conservative legal movement’s supposed attempt to resurrect the “Lochner era,” in order to protect the wealthy from democratic majorities.

    First, off, it’s wrong to say that the “conservative legal movement” wants to revive Lochner. Both progressive and conservative jurists are generally united in their rejection of Lochner. Robert Bork, a thoroughly majoritarian conservative, railed against the case, as did Justice Antonin Scalia. Granted, this is because the conservative legal movement, sadly, has largely embraced the progressive juridical project of the 30’s, which was devoted to weakening the judiciary in order to shove the New Deal down the nation’s throat.

    Second, Lochner‘s many detractors almost never grapple with the facts of the case. As a result, they frequently misunderstand it. Here’s what actually happened. In the early 1900’s, New York enacted a nitpicky law that saddled bakeries with an avalanche of finite requirements–limits on ceiling heights, limits on the kind of floor, and the demand to whitewash the walls every three months, among other things. But the provision dealt with in Lochner was this: “No employee shall be required or permitted to work in a biscuit, bread or cake bakery or confectionary establishment than 60 hours in one week or more than 10 hours in any one day.”

    A Bavarian immigrant named Joseph Lochner who owned a Utica bakery was criminally indicted for violating this law. Aman Schmitter, another immigrant, lived with his family above the bakery and worked for Joseph. Aman happily worked over sixty hours a week in order to care for his family and increase his skills, and he said so in a sworn affidavit.

    It is undisputed that New York’s law was not about health, safety, or protecting workers, though New York tried to say so at the time. Rather, New York passed the law at the behest of powerful bakeries and baker unions in a patent attempt to crush small, family-owned bakeries that relied upon flexible work schedules. It gets worse–the law intentionally targeted immigrant bakeries in particular, which tended to be of the small variety that leaned on overtime. The state’s legal brief contained a detestable line that progressives today would certainly associate with Trump: “there have come to [New York] great numbers of foreigners with habits which must be changed.” This is the law that progressives who hate Lochner are defending.

    In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court thankfully struck down this law that was passed to serve the powerful and crush a weak immigrant population. Put that way, it seems startling that anyone today would wish to stand up for this piece of anti-immigrant, protectionist garbage.

    But then again, Lochner is no longer about Lochner. It’s about rejecting a mythical “Lochner era.” Progressives believe that Lochner represented an entire ecosystem of turn-of-the-century jurisprudence in which corrupt judges were smothering the will of the people wholesale. Turns out that era never existed. Law professor David Bernstein has examined old court records concerning state exercises of their police power during that time period and found that there simply was no lengthy period in which courts were whack-a-moling every piece of social legislation that dared to lift its head.

    To the extent that courts of that era did strike down social legislation under the liberty of contract, they did so not to serve the wealthy, but to protect weak minorities–which is of course why robust judicial review exists in the first place. For instance, the Illinois state supreme court struck down a deeply misogynistic law limiting women’s maximum work hours. The Court used the same liberty-of-contract reasoning as Lochner, arguing that women “are entitled to the same rights under the Constitution to make contracts with reference to their labor as are secured thereby to men.” And in Bailey v. Alabama, the wicked Lochner Court struck down a Jim Crow law that created a presumption of fraud when a worker quit after getting an advance payment. The law was aimed at penalizing black workers–an attempt essentially to revive peonage. Do progressives really want to own up to disagreeing with these “Lochner era” precedents? Somehow I doubt it.

    Lochner did not, as Lochner‘s enemies love to claim, replace the legislature’s judgment with the judgment of the Court. Instead, the Court was willing to look skeptically at the legislature’s motives and demand that the legislature do its work and show that a law burdening a basic right is necessary. The New York law failed that test spectacularly.

    Of course, Lochner‘s legacy does demand that courts counter democratic will when it conflicts with fundamental rights. Alexander Bickel famously called this the counter-majoritarian difficulty, something that has preoccupied the judiciary for a century. If you really care about minorities, though, you might consider Judge Janice Rogers Brown’s insight: “But the better view may be that the Constitution created the countermajoritarian difficulty in order to thwart more potent threats to the Republic: the political temptation to exploit the public appetite for other people’s money–either by buying consent with broad-based entitlements or selling subsidies, licensing restrictions, tariffs, or price fixing regimes to benefit narrow special interests.”

    In any case, if progressives continue to take a polly-anna view of unfettered democracy despite the evidence, they should at least bother to get the facts right on Lochner.

     

    Nike’s speech rights?

    Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty, Politics , , ,

    Nike’s decision to scuttle the Betsy Ross flag shoe design says so much about how touchy we’ve become as a society. Maybe Nike’s being too politically correct, maybe Nike’s critics are being too outraged. Probably both. What interests me, though, is Arizona’s threat to withdraw financial incentives dangled in front of Nike as an incentive to build a plant in the state. Does this implicate Nike’s free speech rights? I think it might.

    The interesting aspect of this scenario is that it features the flip sides of two coins. Rather than being punished for speaking, Nike is being punished for refraining to speak. And rather than punishing my Nike by, say, imposing an additional tax, Arizona is threatening to withdraw an incentive that the state isn’t obligated to provide in the first place.

    As to the first point, it has long been clear that expression itself is not the only thing protected by the free speech guarantee. Rather, the First Amendment protects decisions about expression, including the decision not to engage in speech. The unusual aspect of this situation is that the government is not trying to compel Nike to speak a message created by or sponsored by the government. Rather, Arizona is penalizing the company for creating its own expression and then changing its mind. Still, I think this would likely be considered to be part of one’s right not to speak.

    As to the withdrawal of incentives, the free speech guarantee forbids the government from placing an unconstitutional condition on a government benefit–i.e., you better sell that shoe with the Betsy Ross flag on it, or you don’t get those tax breaks. Government can’t force someone to waive a constitutional right in exchange for a government benefit.

    The other interesting question here is whether Nike’s speech–or lack thereof–would be considered commercial speech, which is less protected than other forms of speech. In a way, the Betsy Ross flag shoe nicely demonstrates why this is a silly distinction–the flag has deep political meaning. Why does it matter that it’s printed on a retail shoe rather than stuck on a sign in someone’s yard?

    In any case, it seems like there’s a plausible free speech problem behind Arizona’s overreaction, here. I’m curious to see if anything comes of it.

    School choice at the Supreme Court

    Ethan Blevins History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Religion , , , , ,

    Another school funding case is knocking at the U.S. Supreme Court’s door. This case, Espinoza v. Walborn, hales from Montana, where the state’s fledgling school-choice program was killed moments after it left the crib. The Court now has a chance to revive it and land a major victory for educational choice across the country.

    Montana’s first school-choice law, passed in 2015, took the form of a tax-credit scholarship program. If a taxpayer donated to an approved scholarship organization, she could claim up to $150 of the donation as a tax credit. The scholarship organizations then dished out scholarships to help parents afford to put their kids through private school.

    Then the Montana Department of Revenue gutted it. The Department promulgated a rule that none of that scholarship money could go to religious private schools. This basically killed the program, since the vast majority of private schools in Montana–and in most states–are religious schools.

    The Department claimed that the state constitution prohibited the scholarship dollars from going to religious schools because of the state ban on indirect public aid to religious schools. This is an absurd argument. The scholarship funds are privately donated dollars–they never touch a public coffer. The fact that someone can claim a tax credit hardly means that the donation becomes “public funds” because of diverted revenue. Such an argument, extended to its logical conclusion, would mean that all money is the government’s, and when it graciously declines to tax us, that extra money of ours is in fact part of the public fisc.

    Nonetheless, the government prevailed at the Montana Supreme Court. In fact, the Court did the state one better–they just invalidated the whole tax-credit program, even for the few parents who might use a scholarship to send their kids to a secular school.

    It’s a terrible blow to parents in Montana trying to find some genuine variety in education. But it also gives the Supreme Court a chance to right a wrong that has been festering in education policy for well over a century. The Supreme Court should hold that barring religious schools from accessing a neutral and generally available funding program violates the Free Exercise Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

    The portion of Montana’s state constitution that laid the tax-credit program in an early grave is known as a Blaine Amendment, named after 19th-century Congressman James Blaine. In 1875, Blaine proposed a federal constitutional amendment that would, among other things, prohibit states from funding “sectarian” schools with public money. Blaine’s federal amendment failed, but many states passed state-level amendments to the same effect, and Congress managed to make inclusion of such amendments a condition of statehood for new states entering the union.

    The history is clear that these amendments are rooted in anti-Catholic bigotry. As the United States transitioned to a public school system, public schools had a distinctly Protestant flavor (often state-endorsed or even state-forced). Catholic migrants therefore began forming and attending private religious schools of their own. The backlash was fierce, and anti-Catholic sentiment often expressed itself in hostility to Catholic schools. James Blaine’s proposed amendment was a key manifestation of this bigotry.

    And the bigotry lives on today. Ironically, however, now opponents of genuine choice in education have retrofitted Blaine Amendments as a partisan weapon to combat vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts. Montana’s law is only the most recent victim. If the Supreme Court doesn’t grant this case and strike down these state laws rooted in religious bigotry, it won’t be the last.

    Old Property

    Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty, Philosophy , ,

    Property is the basis for every right and ounce of autonomy we have. James Madison called property “that dominion which one claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.” Madison went on to argue that basically every right we enjoy is reducible to a property right. We have property in our opinions, in the free use of our faculties, in the safety and liberty of our body, and so on. He believed that “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort” and a government can only be just if it “impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”

    But government has not remained impartial in this endeavor. It has become a massive property owner in its own right.  It has also become a gatekeeper, setting the terms for individuals’ uses of their own property. It has also become a broker and redistributor of property. And finally, it has =become a creator of property in the form of entitlements–what Charles Reich famously called “new property.” It’s this last role that I’d like to discuss here.

    Government’s role as a creator of property has muddled and watered down the strength of property rights. The problem began when U.S. courts started grappling with claims that individuals had been deprived of a constitutional right when government stripped them of a government-created entitlement, such as social security.

    Courts confronted with this problem basically held that while constitutional rights do attach to entitlements, the government has an increased authority to limit the rights to those entitlements. Essentially, since the government created the entitlement, the government can define the scope and terms of that entitlement.

    This “new property” doctrine then became entangled with a different idea altogether. The United States Constitution protects against deprivations of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. The Constitution, however, does not define property. Courts have held instead that state law defines property , and the Constitution then protects rights to that property.

    That does not mean, however, that all property can be whisked away at a whim as if it is all “new property.” Rather, even though state law may establish what property is, states do not have the power to mutate and redefine all property rights on a whim. In essence, there is “new property” and then there is “old property.”

    “Old property” is a bundle of long-recognized property rights rooted in common law. But just because those rights have arisen from common law courts over the centuries does not mean that these are property rights created by government in the same sense as less-protected “new property.” There is a fundamental difference, for constitutional purposes, between government recognizing a boundary line and creating a food stamp program. In some sense, this difference strikes a deeper philosophical chord, one that distinguishes between positive law and natural law–or fundamental rights that are acknowledged and respected by government, and entitlements that are created and controlled by government.

    What are these fundamental property rights? Most are intuitive and understood by babies as soon as their hands are capable of grasping. They include the right to exclude others (the first property right understood by all children everywhere), the right to quiet enjoyment, the right dispose of the property by sale or lease, the right to develop and improve the property, etc. That right extends to chattel and land–things the government does not create but simply exist and are brought under human ownership through a first-in-time rule or a transfer.

    The idea that “new property” deserves lesser protection because government dictates its bounds has bled over into the “old property” rights. This stems from confusion between government recognizing the existence of a fundamental right and government creating an entitlement. Extensive permitting regimes have only exacerbated this confusion. When local governments demand a permit before a property owner can do something with their land, the government looks upon that permit as an entitlement–a privilege and not a right. Thus, “new property” ideas come to overlay and suffocate “old property.” As permitting regimes expand, the world of “old property” retracts. But that permit is not a “new property” entitlement–it’s a condition placed upon a fundamental background right–an intruder upon natural law. When a permitting authority tries to strip away or deny a permit, that denial should be subjected to the full rigor of constitutional scrutiny offered to “old property,” not the weak sauce protections for entitlements.

    If a government is only just if it limits itself to protecting what is ours, as Madison believed, then we don’t have many just governments left to us. Courts could help by establishing a clearer distinction between the old and the new forms of property so that governments can’t get away with redefining or stripping away fundamental property rights.