Federal Jurisdiction

2 November

• Figuring out whether Congress has really succesfully used its 14A power can be complex. The congruence and proportionality test: does the remedy created by the statute vindicate a right described in § 1 of 14A?
• Civil Rights Act of 1871: § 1983. Again, this is substantive law, not really jurisdiction. Prior to Alden we used to think that sovereign immunity was a jurisdiction issue (11A), but then it turned into a more substantive doctrine, pre-dating the constitution.

  Here again, we're studying something that looks like substantive law, but turns out to have jurisdictional consequences.

  § 1983 creates a cause of action that you can use to vindicate some rights. But a lot of this has to do with the roles of federal and state courts.

• Monroe
  Frankfurter's dissent is jurisdictional in nature, but the majority (and Harlan's concurrence) want it to mean something more.

  So what did 14A change about the roles of state and federal courts?

  The violation of rights was pretty obvious, so why is this case in federal court (i.e., the Monroes could just sue for torts of trespass, battery, violations of rights, etc.)?

  Where there are rights, there are remedies, right? So do we need § 1983 to vindicate our rights? Note that § 1983 talks about violations of rights guaranteed by any state. Do constitutional rights give rise to tort claims when they are violated, or are they just defenses you can assert when the government is trying to do something to you?

  Remember back in Young, Harlan's dissent included the notion that rights are a shield-- a citizen shouldn't need to bring a suit against a state. That's one view of rights, but the cases we have indicate that rights can allow citizen plaintiffs to sue.

  And that's important here: the government would no longer be coming after Monroe (because he wasn't the guy they were looking for), so if we think that rights require remedies, we need him to be able to sue.

  OK, so back to the original question: if you didn't have § 1983 to work with, would there be an implied cause of action so that we could vindicate our rights? Sort of an academic question, since we do have § 1983, but there are implied rights of action against federal officials (who are outside of § 1983).

  So who are the fundamental guardians of individual rights: state courts or federal courts? Frankfurter seems to think you should only access federal courts in cases where there isn't already a state law claim (or where state law authorizes some intolerable action). This is largely an allocation of resources argument (see bottom of p. 524).

  Harlan's concurrence suggests that there's no sense in the statute drawing a distinction between authorized and unauthorized law enforcement behavior.

  But the 1871 congress suspected that maybe not everyone's rights would be well-protected in state courts. Does the jurisdictional effect of § 1983 reflect a disparagement of state courts? We trust state courts with criminal cases in general, and those involve direct conflict between the states and individuals. But both Monroe and Mitchum basically say that the state courts are inferior when it comes to vindicating federal rights, and that's why you don't have to prove they're inadequate: congress rejected parity with § 1983.

  Frankfurter's dissent is important later on (i.e., in abstention doctrine: we want to trust state courts with certain things).

• The standard for qualified immunity. There are relatively few officials who get absolute immunity: prosecutors, legislators, and the president (but not the governors). Most officials get qualified immunity.

  The doctrine has been shaped to deal with pragmatic litigation realities. This foreshadows habeas corpus doctrine, to an extent.

  So you can sue all kinds of state actors for damages: police, teachers, etc. (note: this means suits against the individual actors, who may carry insurance). And in some cases, there will be a defense of immunity.

  How much immunity do these folks have? What is the test for qualified immunity? Why give government defendants immunity and not private defendants? Well, you have to have state action to violate constitutional rights, for one thing.

  Why do we have immunity? See the list on p. 533.

• Wood v. Strickland specified the two-prong test for immunity:
  1. Subjective: Good faith-- the state actor is acting sincerely and with a belief that right is being done
  2. Objective: The state actor knew or reasonably should have known that the action would violate the rights of the plaintiff
  If you failed either of these, you didn't have immunity. Then we got rid of the subjective part. Ironically Powell and Rhenquist complained about the objective prong, but then in Harlow they got rid of the subjective part.
• Harlow v. Fitzgerald
  Why get rid of the subjective prong? Too much litigation. We might not get fewer cases, but we can dispose of them earlier (i.e., summary judgment). We're trying to deal with a flood of lawsuits, and clear them out earlier. And the objective test can be decided as a matter of law, whereas you'll always at least want discovery for the subjective side.

  So the question basically devolves into whether the law at issue was clearly established. We assume that a reasonable person would have known about a clearly established law, and we don't have to worry about whether you were malicious or not.

  Getting rid of the subjective prong allows us to move a lot of cases through more simply.

• Now, of course, it's not always easy to decide if a law is clearly established-- that's problem 9-2. But the litigation advantage is that it doesn't require a trial: we can decide this just by reading the law.
• Anderson v. Creighton
  The objective test doesn't turn on abstract concerns-- the law must be specific. We're balancing protection of individual rights with the need not to paralyze public officials in the performance of their duties.

  So we can agree that there should be immunity, and this case is about how to calibrate it.

• See the discussion of Saucier v. Katz on p. 535. First we ask: assuming all the facts alleged are true, was there a violation? Then we ask: if so, was the right clearly established? Why would the court want to issue advisory opinions about what rights are, if they're just going to moot the issue with that second question? Well, we want courts to say what the law is and what our rights are-- that is what will make the law clear so that officers can know what they're supposed to do.

  But then we get Pearson v. Callahan which says that courts can use discretion in that ordering. It's not clear whether courts will exercise that discretion as a matter of judicial restraint to avoid unnecessary constitutional decisions. Sort of a wishy-washy opinion: there are theories why either ordering might be right, and the court just basically refuses to pick one. We want to equip judges to do what's right, I guess.

4 November

• Abstention comes from the problem of federal and state courts operating in parallel, and the idea of parity. There can be conflicts between federal courts in different districts, and conflicts between state courts in different states, but here we're talking about problems that arise when federal and state courts are considering things at the same time, and there's risk of duplication or interference.
• Now there are some categories where federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction, and some where there's no federal jurisdiction so it's state only. But lots of the time we have concurrent jurisdiction.
• The anti-injunction act. Comparison between the 1793 act and 28 USC § 2283, and not much has changed (this is from Younger, p. 657). During all that time, there have been only three exceptions:
  1. Except as expressly authorized by congress
  2. Where necessary in aid of its jurisdiction
  3. To protect and effectuate its judgments
  Other than those three, federal courts can not enjoin state court proceedings. There's one other judge-made exception (Ex Parte Young): if the proceeding in state court has not yet begun, and a person who is about to be prosecuted can show that he'll suffer irreparable harm. But Harlan's dissent (in Young) asserts that this injunction is improper.
• Now note that this tactic only works if you are a party in a federal court, and you haven't yet become a defendant in state court. To stop a proceeding already underway is offensive and inefficient.

  We want to preserve comity (i.e., avoid needless friction). It's also federalism, of course. And Federalism (this is yet again in Younger) doesn't mean blind deference to states' rights. Still, the "normal thing to do" is not to enjoin pending state proceedings.

• Mitchum v. Foster
  This is about a year after Younger, incidentally. And it's strange that the court in Younger doesn't address § 2283-- why go through the trouble to make common-law doctrine to get rid of the case, if we could just find ourselves in one of the exceptions.

  Here (Mitchum), we find that § 1983 fits the first exception. How come Younger goes straight to making common law, without first analyzing the statute?

  Younger says you can get an injunction when the state court is inadequate. So note that here, Mitchum's § 1983 claim is that his prosecution in state court IS the state action that's depriving him of his rights; so we need there to be an exception in § 2283, or else he can't vindicate his rights.

  See p. 635 for humor: an implied power is read to be express authorization.

  Younger's claim that it doesn't need to reach § 2283 is a little ridiculous: common law is trumped by statute, and the court just sort of proceeds as though there's no such thing. It implicitly decides that § 1983 is outside of § 2283, but it likes common law doctrine more, because it leaves the court with more discretion to carve out the exceptions it likes.

  In Mitchum the court's hand is forced because the lower court rested on § 2283 grounds. So they have to get § 2283 out of the way. But (the concurrence) sends the queue to rely on Younger and not issue the injuction. This is an aspect of comity: the federal courts must engineer the situation so that the state courts are willing to get with the program and be on board with federal rights.

  So we don't have a lot of injunctions, but there's still habeas if your rights are trampled in state court.

• Dombrowski (forerunner to Younger) prosecutors using their power in bad faith to harrass civil rights workers. By the way, when we talk about enjoining a state court proceeding, that generally means enjoining the prosecutor (the prosecutor, e.g., got enjoined in Ex Parte Young).
• Atlantic Coast Line
  The other two exceptions to § 2283 may not be as useful as they look. The court really doesn't want to interfere with the state courts, and resists expanding the arguments for them.

  We're not going to get around § 2283 just on the basis of claim preclusion. These are narrow exceptions.