Federal Jurisdiction

9 November

• Ah, abstention doctrines.
• Pullman
  So what is the sensitive issue here, and why should the court develop an abstention doctrine to avoid the constitutional question?

  The Texas Railroad Commission basically requires that there be at least one white Pullman employee on each sleeper car. Pullman had been cutting back on white workers because they could pay black people less, so the groups were pitted against one another, but they won political favor in TX.

  So the idea here is that the challenged law could be invalidated under the TX statute that empowers the railroad commission-- can it make a law requiring that the white workers have jobs?

  Isn't it a duty of the court to articulate federal rights, and aren't the federal courts the primary guardians of constitutional rights? But here we have state law in federal courts, and the final interpreter of state law should be the state supreme court. So maybe we want to hint to the state court that they should construe their statute in order to avoid the constitutional question. That's one way of avoiding needless friction with the state courts-- it's a little invasive, but needfully so, because the alternative might be to strike down the state statute.

  So this doctrine (typical of Frankfurter) is deferential to federalism, but it's not terribly efficient. Frankfurter thinks that this avoidance of jurisdiction is a good thing (see quote on the top of p. 648). He even talks about efficiency, but he's talking about efficiency for the federal judges, not for the plaintiffs. And indeed, perhaps thanks to this procedural obstacle, this case never went anywhere after this absention.

  Still, maybe (and recall Frankfurter's dissent in Monroe v. Pape) the federal courts should be a last resort, and it's better to try and resolve problems within the state.

• So why, under Constantineau (p. 649) does the court not abstain to let WI resolve this under the state constitution? This would be a nice strategy for reducing the load on federal courts, because state constitutions usually have rights in parallel to the federal constitution. Perhaps because parallel language in a state constitution might not mean the exact same thing.
• England v. Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners
  Windsor said that the state court has to alert the state court to constitutional challenges, but it's not necessary to litigate the constitutional claim in state court. The state court just has to decide the state issues in light of the constitutional claim. When we use Pullman abstention, it's because we see an ambiguity in state law, one interpretation of which will present the constitutional question, and one which will not.

  OK, so what if the state court resolves the constitutional issue anyway? That's England: if you want to reserve your federal issue for federal court, make it explicit.

• Note that if you're a plaintiff, and you think you might get Pullman-abstained, you might (for the sake of efficiency) bring your whole claim in state court.

  And note that this is basically a technique to get an advisory opinion from the state court: a ruling that can then be plugged into the federal case. So if you're against advisory opinions (and indeed, Federal courts could not do this), you might think this isn't the greatest idea.

  As a footnote, even when there's a statutory certification procedure, so that a federal court can directly ask the state supreme court a question (WI has this), it's not necessarily convenient.

  Anyway, this is a doctrine that prefers getting authoritative opinions about state law to efficiency.

• Problem 10-2: the 9^th's extra prong for Pullman abstention is in (1): the sensitive issue that the federal courts ought to avoid.
• Younger v. Harris
  So Harris is being prosecuted under a law that basically makes it a crime to advocate overthrowing the government. And we've got some other people, not directly parties to Harris's propsecution, but who allege a chilling effect.

  So there is a federal statute (§ 2283) against enjoining state proceedings, but we saw in Mitchum that this can be overcome. So then there was also Dombrowski v. Pfister, which appeared to say it's possible to enjoin prosecution when the state is trying to enforce overly broad laws that impugn 1A rights.

  But the difference there was that there the prosecutor was more or less harrassing the defendants-- bad faith prosecution. And the state court (therefore) wasn't really in a position to cure the ill-- the laws themselves weren't the problem, it was the prosecutor. Here there's just a single good-faith prosecution, and there's no irreparable injury that goes beyond what can be dealt with at the state level: the state can cure it within the context of the proceeding at hand.

  And note that this is the end of the Warren court, and the start of the Burger court. One of the issues in Nixon's 1968 election was getting the crazy people off the court and putting on some more stable entities. But even Brennan and Marshall (holdovers from the Warren era) concur on this, so it can't be too much of an ideological departure.

• So if you're a rights claimant, you can choose to go to federal court. But if the state starts a proceeding, you should deal with your federal issues there, as a rule-- we can't allow (criminal) defenants to run the show by exploiting the Mitchum interpretation of § 2283.
• And if there's no ongoing case in state court, we're not in the Younger doctrine.
• But what about the case where a criminal statute dies have a chilling effect? We thought Dombrowski would help us with this (i.e., the other plaintiffs in Younger). We thew those folks out, on the basis of standing, but we do allow defendants (at least in 1A cases) to assert the rights of all people when questioning the constitutionality of the statute.

  Harris has an injury in fact for standing purposes, but he doesn't have an irreparable injury in fact for injunction purposes, so it's OK to let his case proceed in state court. We don't want every criminal prosecution to give rise to a § 1983 claim, basically. But do we want an exception to Younger for facial challenges to statutes under 1A?

  That's one of the criticisms of Younger, but note the discussion of how injunctions couldn't really cure the chilling effect anyway (p. 659). So go to state court, and if they let you down, you've got habeas (§ 2254) or appeal in state court and then to SCOTUS. You can't use § 1983 as a strategy to invoke federal jurisdiction to review the state court decision (this is the Rooker-Feldman doctrine).

11 November

• So the court prefers judge-made abstention doctrine to the absolutism of statutory command.
• So we have two parallel justice systems (state and federal), and litigators have preferences about where they want to be.
• All these doctrines show that the federal courts feel themselves empowered to create abstention doctrines in particular cases. Pullman and Younger are the big ones. The others mostly stand for the proposition that federal courts can design abstention doctrines (they don't want to (see p. 693: "the virtually unflagging obligation").
• Burford and Thibodaux are not about federal question: they're diversity cases. And in Burford there were a log of factors that made this better suited to state court (see p. 688): the state already has a procedure for dealing with this complicated interrelated problem. Thibodaux is an eminent domain case-- no federal question, and it's the state exercising its special state powers.
• In Pullman we sent it to state court because of the state law issues (avoiding unnecessary interpretation of federal law if the state court can resolve it). In Younger, we send a federal question to state court so as not to interfere with ongoing proceedings. These later doctrines (Burford and Thibodaux) are about issues where the state's interests are primary.
• Colorado River is about parallel proceedings. The only reason we've got abstention here is that the McCarran amendment is interpreted as expressing a policy about avoiding piecemeal litigation. Why were the courts so keen to get out of this? It seems like the court really strains to get rid of the case. Possibly because they didn't feel that the federal courts were capable of handling the water rights cases. There's something strange/bogus going on here.
• These doctrines are really judicial self-defense: the court is going to abstain from this particular case in order to avoid incurring the risk of inflexible statutory restraint.
• Steffel v. Thompson
  This is 3 years after Younger.

  So if we file our federal claim before the state prosecution is underway, can we avoid Younger? Yes, but we don't avoid the problem of standing. Compare Steffel with the other would-be defendants in Younger: he's got a much more concrete and particularized issue, so he has standing, whereas they did not.

  So there's a window: on one side we have standing problems, and on the other, we've got Younger. That's what Hicks v. Miranda is about-- can there be a race to the courtroom. And we worry about this exploit: if the state wants to get out of being sued in federal court, can they just start prosecuting you? If the federal court hasn't gone far enough, it appears like you would be Younger-ed out of there. So there's not really a race to the courhouse-- the federal court tends to defer (there's a lot of caselaw about how much federal proceeding is enough to bar Younger abstention: were there "proceedings of substance on the merits?").

• Problem 10-3:
  1. 1. Is the declaratory judgment a "proceeding of substance upon the merits?" (see Hawaii Housing at the bottom of p. 670).
     2. Does it matter that ajudicating one defendant's federal case will affect a state defendant's case? This is Hicks-esque: are their interests so intertwined?
  2. 1. This is a far cry from bad faith.
     2. Becker wasn't in the first case, so this isn't re-litigation.
• A tricky thing about abstention doctrine: the moment you state it, people will be able to look for ways to get around it, so the doctrine keeps getting refined.
• Habeas corpus is an exception to the usual doctrine of res judicata.