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October 24, 2014

Whether and Why Delegations of Government Power to Private Actors Are Problematic

Cross-posted from Justia's Verdict.

Among the interesting U.S. Supreme Court cases this fall is U.S. Department of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads, to be argued in about a month, involving the so-called "nondelegation" doctrine - the idea that Congress cannot lawfully delegate or cede legislative powers to other institutions or actors. If the Court ends up relying on some form of a nondelegation principle in striking down the federal statute at issue, the case would break important new ground.

Background on the Nondelegation Concept

The nondelegation idea gets fought over most often in the context of statutes that confers very broad-arguably overly broad-power to the executive branch. As I and other scholars have written, under the Necessary and Proper Clause of the Constitution, each constitutionally granted congressional power "implies a power to create authority under it sufficient to effect its purposes." But for over 150 years, the Court's decisions have been sprinkled with categorical statements that Congress may not relinquish any of its powers to enact legislation through grants to federal administrators. The first Justice Harlan's statement of this nondelegation doctrine in Field v. Clark is typical: "That Congress cannot delegate legislative power to the President is a principle universally recognized as vital to the integrity and maintenance of the system of government ordained by the Constitution."

The Supreme Court has twice struck down federal legislation as having improperly delegated legislative power to the President, but both of these cases are more than 70 years old, and came from a Court that was known for its systematically ungenerous attitude towards congressional legislation. Since 1935, the Court has not invalidated a single congressional delegation of legislative authority to an administrative agency or the President, even though many grants of authority that have been upheld are arguably broader than those struck down in 1935. In 1974, when Justice William Douglas's majority opinion in one case construed the fee-setting authority of a federal agency narrowly so as to avoid nondelegation problems, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote:

The notion that the Constitution confines the power of Congress to delegate authority to administrative agencies, which was briefly in vogue in the 1930's, has been virtually abandoned by the Court for all practical purposes . . . The doctrine is surely as moribund as the substantive due process approach of the same era-for which the Court is fond of writing an obituary - if not more so.

The explanation for this judicial hesitance to intervene is easy to see: almost all laws create some significant enforcement discretion in the executive branch, and drawing a principled line between allowable standard-guided authorizations of executive power, on the one hand, and impermissible standardless delegations to the executive branch, on the other, is well-nigh impossible for courts to do. As a result, the Court simply said that Congress must lay down some "intelligible principle" by which the executive branch can determine how to enforce a law, and it has found every law that has come before it to have at least one such "intelligible principle."

The Railroad Case Currently Before the Court

The case pending before the Justices involves a related, but arguably distinct, kind of nondelegation problem: delegation of lawmaking power by Congress to a private actor. Although the facts of the case are complex, in basic terms the statute under challenge works as follows: The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), a federal agency that regulates railroads, is directed to work with Amtrak-a complicated hybrid entity that partakes of some private characteristics and some public features-to come up with some performance standards for Amtrak. If Amtrak falls too far short of meeting these standards, another federal agency is directed to investigate whether other railroads-whose rail lines are used by Amtrak-are not giving Amtrak sufficient access to the railways to permit Amtrak to perform better. So far, so good. The potential problem? If the FRA and Amtrak can't agree on performance standards to be adopted, the FRA doesn't have the power to override Amtrak's resistance. Amtrak, in effect, has at least a temporary veto over the FRA's proposals. In cases of such impasse, the FRA is limited to submitting the matter to an arbitrator, who then gets to decide which standards to adopt. And the statute by its terms doesn't make clear whether the arbitrator must be a public official or institution, as opposed to a private actor.

Based on this statutory scheme, non-Amtrak railroads brought a challenge alleging that the statute gives private-sector entities (Amtrak and the arbitrator) a right to veto and determine the content of regulation of the railroad industry, including regulation of Amtrak's competitors. Conferral of this power, the challengers argued, constitutes an impermissible delegation of federal lawmaking powers to private parties. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed, calling the statute "legislative delegation in it most obnoxious form," and observing that delegations to private actors create difficulties that "are even more prevalent" than those raised by delegations to the executive branch. Indeed, the D.C. Circuit observed that "even an intelligible principle cannot rescue a statute empowering private parties to wield regulatory authority."

Resolving the Case Without Breaking New Nondelegation Ground

The Court may (indeed should) be able to dispose of this case without engaging a fundamental inquiry into the nondelegation doctrine as it applies to private actors. The Court could easily find Amtrak to be a public entity, in which case, at worst, the statute confers power in multiple federal executive agencies rather than to private entities, and (under the intelligible principle idea) the government would win.

The Court could also reasonably hold that the performance standards at issue here do not constitute lawmaking or regulation in any meaningful sense, since they are used-at most-to initiate investigations into whether non-Amtrak railroads have been violating federal law; the performance standards do not themselves apply to any other railroads. And quite often federal investigation of wrongdoing is triggered by private actors, so Amtrak's role in devising standards that are used to help decide whether investigation of potential illegality is warranted should be unproblematic.

Or the Court might hold the outside arbitrator who resolves disputes between Amtrak and the FRA must be another federal governmental entity, such that private actors (even if Amtrak is deemed a private entity) do not in fact control or have a veto over the formulation of the standards. And many earlier cases make clear that mere involvement or input by private parties in the regulatory process does not, absent a private-party veto over proposed regulation, create delegation problems. Indeed, if the Court thinks a nondelegation problem were otherwise created by Amtrak's role in the standard-setting process, and that the inclusion of a government arbitrator as a tiebreaker between Amtrak and the FRA would solve the problem, the Court would almost have to read the (ambiguous) statutory references to the arbitrator to mean government arbitrator, because the Court is ordinarily supposed to read ambiguous statutes so as to avoid, rather than create, constitutional questions.

But should the Court, for one reason or another, reach the core of the nondelegation claim, it will have to decide whether the D.C. Circuit is correct that alleged delegations to private parties cannot be cured by intelligible principles, and that such delegations constitute the most serious offense to the nondelegation norm. On these big questions, I am not at all sure the D.C. Circuit got it completely right. To see why, we must first look at where the nondelegation doctrine comes from. (Interested readers can consult earlier and more elaborate work I've published in the Vanderbilt Law Review, on which some of the ideas explained below are built.)

Background on the Nondelegation Idea Itself

The nondelegation doctrine is said to have both textual and theoretical underpinnings. Textually, Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution provides that "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives" (emphasis added). The theoretical justifications of the nondelegation doctrine stem from, as Professor Laurence Tribe has observed, "implicit constitutional requirements of consensual government under law." As Tribe has explained, American political theory finds legitimacy of government in the "supposed consent of the governed." This notion of consent presupposes the possibility of tracing governmental exercise of power to a choice made by a "representative" branch that is "politically and legally responsible" to the People. Thus, the valid exercise of a congressionally created power depends upon the prior "adoption of a declared policy by Congress and its definition of the circumstances in which its command is to be effective . . . ."

Both the textual and theoretical justifications for a nondelegation principle are open to question. First, it is not clear why the term "vested" in Article I means nondelegable. After all, Article II provides that "[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America," yet no one doubts that the President may transfer executive authority to his underlings in the Executive Branch. Moving from text to theory, why does the "traceability" requirement foreclose delegation? Why can't we "trace" congressional delegations to the President back to Congress and hold it accountable accordingly? After all, as I just observed, the President delegates executive authority to unelected underlings, and yet we seem to believe that his accountability suffices under American democratic theory. Nor did "accountability" prohibit the People of the United States from delegating some of their sovereign power of self-determination to the federal government by ratifying the Constitution. The fact that the People have given temporary authority to federal institutions to govern on their behalf does not, under American democratic theory, mean that sovereignty has been "divested" from the People and permissibly delegated to the government.

Some might respond to my analogies by pointing out that the People are free to reclaim the power they have given to federal institutions through constitutional amendment, and that the President is free to reclaim authority he has given to his underlings at will. This is all true enough, but it suggests that delegations of power are not problematic per se, but that what might be driving at least part of the nondelegation concern is the ability (or inability) to reclaim power once delegated. This possibility is supported by seminal work done at the beginning of last century by Professors Patrick W. Duff and Horace E. Whiteside. These scholars attempted to uncover the origins of the Latin nondelegation maxim, "delegata potestas non potest delegari," which most people understand to mean "delegated power may not be redelegated." Their groundbreaking historical research established that the earliest forms of the common law agency nondelegation maxim-thought by many to explain much of the American constitutional nondelegation concern-were phrased somewhat differently: Delegated authority cannot "be so delegated, that the primary (or regulating) power does not remain with the King himself" (emphasis added). As Professors Duff and Whiteside conclude, the concern is that the "King's power not be diminished by its delegation to others." This reformulation focuses attention on one key aspect of the delegation problem: that delegation is more problematic when it is harder to reclaim.

This perspective would suggest that delegations to private actors are in some ways less problematic than delegations to the President. When Congress tries to reclaim delegations to the President, the President (who might be enjoying the delegation) can attempt to veto the proposed repeal law, requiring a supermajority of both houses to overcome. By contrast, if Congress doesn't like the way Amtrak (if Amtrak be a private entity) is obstructing federal regulation, it can amend the statute to dilute or eliminate Amtrak's involvement. And unlike the executive branch headed by the President, Amtrak (notwithstanding its political clout) cannot formally veto a subsequent reclamation attempt by Congress.

There are, of course, some ways in which delegations to private actors raise distinct constitutional problems that must be taken into account. Private actors (unlike the executive branch) have virtually no public accountability, and Congress may be too busy to address their misdeeds by repealing legislation. Moreover, and related, regulation in the hands of private actors often raises profound conflict-of-interest and anti-competition problems, with some market participants improperly empowered to make rules governing competitors. But these problems can be addressed without resort to the nondelegation problem; if private actors are wielding government power in ways that are unfair to other private actors, the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Constitution are the appropriate vehicles. Why might, say, due process be better than the nondelegation doctrine for these purposes?

One reason is that states have nondelegation doctrines that often mirror the federal approach. Indeed, state constitutions usually have the same kind of text (e.g., all legislative power is vested in a legislature and all executive power is vested in a governor) and theory as the federal Constitution, giving rise to doctrine substantially similar to federal law. When we think about application of nondelegation ideas at the state level, we see that due process review, which invokes an explicit balancing of interests, is the right kind of contextual approach to discern problematic delegations (such as giving General Motors a right to regulate car safety standards for its competitors, to use one of the D.C. Circuit's examples) from unproblematic delegations (such as a minister being empowered to facilitate a civil marriage). (Indeed, even if the Amtrak case really does involve delegation to a private party, it is not clear to me that such a delegation raises major conflict-of-interest or anti-competition concerns - those questions would have to be looked at more carefully.) If we use an uncompromising nondelegation doctrine instead of due process, the system would lack the flexibility to distinguish true problems-where delegation creates harm to the interests of third-parties-from formalistic ones-where regulatory or implementation power may technically be performed by private actors, but in settings where such privatization does no real harm.

So I hope that, whatever the Court does in the Amtrak case, the Justices do not embrace an overly broad rejection of all delegations to private actors. And if the Court has problems with the empowerment of Amtrak, I hope the Justices explain how Amtrak's involvement is unfair to other participants, and that they limit their holding to those kinds of situations.

 

October 10, 2014

The Supreme Court to Consider When Threats Can Be Punished Consistent with the First Amendment

Co-authored by Professors Vikram Amar and Alan Brownstein. Cross-posted from Justia's Verdict.

'Tis the season to begin looking carefully at the Supreme Court's 2014-2015 docket, now that the Justices have returned from their summer recess and are hearing cases again. One interesting case to be argued in a couple of months, Elonis v. United States, raises questions about how courts should define so-called "true threats" that fall outside First Amendment protection and thus are subject to punishment. Anthony Elonis was convicted of violating federal criminal statutes that prohibit the interstate transmission of communications containing threats to injure other persons, and his convictions were upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Background Facts of the Dispute

Mr. Elonis allegedly posted threats on Facebook directed at, among others, his ex-wife, federal law enforcement officials, and school children. For example, in referring to FBI officials (who had visited his home to interview him about his activities), Elonis wrote (seemingly in rap-style cadence):

[T]he next time you know, you best be serving a warrant
And bring yo' SWAT an explosives expert while you're at it
Cause little did y'all know, I was strapped wit' a bomb . . .
I was jus' waitin' for y'all to handcuff me and pat me down.
Touch the detonator in my pocket and we're all goin' BOOM!

In another posting, Elonis wrote:

That's it. I've had about enough.
I'm checking out and making a name for myself.
Enough elementary schools in a ten mile radius to initiate the most heinous shooting ever imagined. . .
The only question is. . . which one?"

In posts about his wife, Elonis wrote: "There's one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you. I'm not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts. Hurry up and die, bitch . . . "

Throughout his prosecution, Elonis has challenged the definition of a threat to be used by the jury, namely, that "[a] statement is a true threat [subject to prosecution] when a defendant intentionally makes a statement in a context or under such circumstances wherein a reasonable person would foresee that the statement would be interpreted by those to whom the maker communicates the statement as a serious expression of an intention to inflict bodily injury or take the life of an individual." Elonis argues under the First Amendment (and also under the federal criminal statute he is charged with violating) that, before a person can be punished for expressing a threat, the government must allege and prove that the defendant subjectively intended to threaten his victim. Elonis does not (and could not) argue that the government must prove a defendant intended to carry out the threat, but he does assert that the government must prove that he intended to place the victim in fear of bodily harm or death.

The Third Circuit (along with a large number of other circuits) rejected this kind of subjective intent requirement. Instead, it held that statements that are reasonably construed as threats by the listener can be punished under the First Amendment. Conversely, the Ninth Circuit (and a number of state high courts) has required the subjective intent to threaten as a predicate to a prosecution for threatening speech. The courts that do require subjective intent often rely on the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling in Virginia v. Black, where the Court upheld the major portions of a Virginia statute making intimidating cross burning illegal. While the Court upheld the ban on threats expressed through cross burning, however, it also struck down a part of the Virginia law that made burning a cross itself prima facie proof of intimidation and relieved the state of having to offer any other evidence as to the meaning of the accused's symbolic expression. In reaching its decision, the Court observed that "'true threats' encompass those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals . . . [whether or not] the speaker . . . actually intended to carry out the threat." The Court noted that prohibitions on threats protect individuals from the fear of violence and the disruption that fear creates, and not just from the likelihood of actual violence. The Court also observed that "intimidation in the constitutionally proscribable sense of the word is a type of true threat, where a speaker directs a threat to a person . . . with the intent of placing the victim in fear. . . ." Many of the arguments in Elonis focus on what this language from Black means.

The Issues Elonis Presents

Initially, we offer some relatively modest observations about First Amendment doctrine and Supreme Court practice illustrated by Elonis. First, this is a less-than-ideal vehicle to decide whether intent to threaten is statutorily or constitutionally required, since a reasonable jury might easily conclude that the evidence against Elonis establishes such intent in this case in any event. In other words, if Mr. Elonis wins at the Supreme Court, and the case is sent back for a new trial, a new instruction would be given to the jury but a conviction seems likely in any case. Certainly, the Court can (and will likely) reach the merits in Elonis if it wants to, but this is arguably not the best case for resolving the constitutional issue in dispute.

Second, the Court might avoid the constitutional question by reading a subjective intent requirement into the federal statute. If it does so, then it would still need to rule in a later case on whether the First Amendment requires subjective intent (in the context of a federal or state statute that clearly does not require it.)

Third, notice that much of the debate in this case revolves not around core First Amendment principles, but rather what the Court meant in Virginia v. Black. The Third Circuit's reading of the words in Black certainly seems plausible; the Court's description of "intimidation" as including the intent to instill fear could, as the Third Circuit held, refer to a subset of true threats, rather than a definition of the entire category of true threats. And we think the Ninth Circuit misreads Black to the extent that the Ninth Circuit believes that the Court's result in Black necessarily implies the existence of a subjective intent requirement. Whether or not there is a subjective intent requirement, the Virginia statute that made cross burning prima facie evidence of a threat would be constitutionally problematic because it would relieve the government of having to show, in a case where the defendant exercised his right not to present a defense, that a particular cross burning was, in context, something a reasonable person would perceive as threatening (which is certainly true of many but not all cross burnings).

But more generally, we are not sure the Court in Black was offering a general answer to the question of whether subjective intent in a necessary element the government must prove to convict someone for expressing a true threat. Indeed, we think that assigning so much weight to the precise words Justice O'Connor used in her Black opinion misses the forest for the trees. Determining whether subjective intent is a constitutional prerequisite to punishing a speaker for expressing a true threat is an issue the Court needs to discuss and evaluate on its own terms, not as a derivative discussion of the meaning of ambiguous language in a case where the question was never explicitly raised and thus may not have been on the minds of the Justices whose language is being parsed.

Comparing Threats to Other Types of (Potentially) Harmful Speech

Our fourth, larger point goes to the heart of the matter. If subjective intent is required to hold a person liable under a threat statute when a reasonable person would understand the accused's expression to constitute a serious threat, the speaker who places a victim in fear of bodily harm or death will escape sanction when the government cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the speaker intended to instill fear. But the First Amendment does not give speakers a right to cause, whether intentionally or not, this kind of fear and apprehension. The key free speech issue raised by this case is: When does the First Amendment prevent government from protecting people from speech that undeniably causes real harm because government action jeopardizes other important free speech interests?

We think the best way to analyze this question is to compare the treatment of threats with the treatment of other kinds of potentially harmful speech, such as incitement, defamation, and offensive speech. Threats are proscribed not just because they might lead to action, but because they inflict injury in themselves. Unlike, say, incitement, where the evil to be regulated is the possibility that a listener may be influenced to act on the speaker's words, threats wound by their very utterance. In this respect, laws banning threats are more akin to laws sanctioning defamatory speech. In providing civil sanctions for defamation, at least as to private figure victims, no subjective intent is required before government can regulate such expression, whereas in the former setting (of incitement), the First Amendment does seem to require intent to incite before punishment can be imposed. What accounts for this difference in treatment? The answer cannot be that society thinks incitement is necessarily less dangerous than defamation; the costs of incitement have always been recognized as significant.

One explanation for this difference in treatment is that the government's interest in punishing speech because such speech may influence the thoughts and actions of the audience goes to the very core of why we have a First Amendment. The foundation of free speech doctrine is the right to use speech to persuade others of the merits of our ideas. Thus, when speech is dangerous because it might be acted upon, we are more reluctant to regulate it, and we add the extra layer of a subjective intent requirement as protection against government overreaching. Where speech is dangerous because it causes harm directly, however, (as it does in defamation cases) the government's interests do not conflict directly with foundational free speech principles. Accordingly, we allow the civil sanctioning of defamatory speech without the extra buffer requirement of subjective intent.

Using this comparative analysis, we would ask whether speech that causes a reasonable person to fear that he or she is threatened with bodily harm or death is of sufficient constitutional value to justify courts adding the additional buffer of protection provided by a subjective intent requirement. We are not at all convinced that the value of such speech can justify allowing the harm it causes to go unsanctioned.

Another comparison-this one between threats, incitement and so-called offensive speech (use of vulgar and insensitive words, etc.)-may also be instructive. In the incitement realm we require government to prove intent and immediacy notwithstanding the harm that incendiary speech may cause not only because of our commitment to shielding persuasive speech from government prohibitions. We also recognize that there is a slippery slope with regard to punishing incitement. Every idea expressed with passion risks inciting its audience. And, accordingly, every idea that is critical of the government and its policies risks inciting anti-government behavior and violations of law. If we provide inadequate protection to incitement, all speech critical of government could be subject to sanction.

A similar analysis applies to the full protection we provide to offensive speech. Here too we recognize that offensive speech may cause its victims real harm and anguish. No one doubts that the grieving mourners at a soldier's funeral who were subjected to the disparaging speech of Westboro Baptist Church protestors suffered psychological torment. Yet in Snyder v. Phelps, the Court protected the protestors' right to express their hateful and hurtful message free from civil sanction. But here again we also recognize that tolerance of offensive speech is essential to the maintenance of a free speech regime. Every challenge to orthodoxy may offend some people who are comfortable with the status quo. We must vigorously guard against allowing speech to be punished simply on the ground that it offends people because restricting speech to serve this interest risks swallowing up a substantial part of the First Amendment.

Threats are arguably quite different. Unlike state interests justifying restrictions on incitement or offensive speech, the state's interest in protecting people from threats of physical violence that would instill fear in reasonable people seems more cabined and focused. We do not worry that core free speech principles would be undermined if speech that places reasonable people in fear of serious bodily harm or death is prohibited, whether or not the speaker intends his message to have such a frightening effect.

How Will the High Court Rule?

Some analysts predict the Court will reverse the Third Circuit and add a subjective intent requirement to the test for constitutionally proscribable threats. They say this because the current Court has been extremely protective of expression (even odious expression) in a variety of settings, and because so much speech today (especially in rap music and other popular forms of entertainment) is coarse and uses provocative and sometimes violent language. The notion would be that true threats should not be defined so broadly as to sweep too much of what people actually say in the real world within a category of unprotected speech. (Indeed, Mr. Elonis argues that the rap style of his Facebook postings makes his speech less threatening.)

We understand this argument, but aren't persuaded by it. The prevalence of violent imagery in music and other cultural venues in today's society should already be taken into account by the requirement (on which everyone agrees) that a listener's fear must be reasonable in context, and not based simply on some hypersensitivity to ugly, disturbing language. Unless there is a reason to fear that juries won't already factor changes in speech patterns into the definition of what reasonable people would experience as a threat, it is not clear, at least to us, that an extra element of subjective intent is needed here.

Before we conclude, we do note (circling back to our comparative analysis) that in the defamation setting, constitutional doctrine does require subjective intent (in the form of knowledge or recklessness as to falsity) when the victim is a public official. The case law is more protective of speech critical of our government officials than it is with respect to negative speech concerning private individuals. Perhaps the same should be true for threats; because we want citizens to be free to vent anger against their representatives, maybe we should allow them to engage in threatening speech except when they mean to instill fear. On the other hand, the requirement that a victim/listener feel reasonably threatened might itself be sufficiently flexible to protect vociferous ranting against officials, in that officials are less likely to be reasonable in feeling fear than are ordinary folks because officials should know that citizens may exaggerate their anger and rhetoric when it comes to government. In this regard, we emphasize that a reasonable-victim standard does not give juries carte blanche to punish speech whenever they desire; judges are perfectly capable of ruling that, as a matter of law, certain provocative words cannot, in modern and specific context, be understood by listeners as actual threats that put the listeners in reasonable fear of harm.

October 2, 2014

Major Conference Highlights Impact of Place on Poverty

The UC Davis Center for Poverty Research will host a major conference on the impact place has on poverty and effective interventions on November 13-14. Our own Professor Lisa Pruitt is the conference's organizer.

The conference "Poverty and Place" will host leading scholars in sociology, economics, law, education, social work, geography and planning. They will present new research on how place can aggravate poverty, addressing different aspects of urban, suburban and rural challenges and solutions.

"Concentrated poverty-whether in rural, urban, or suburban places-greatly aggravates the challenges facing those living in poverty, and place-specific or spatial barriers can undermine the efficacy of safety-net programs," said Professor Pruitt. "This conference takes up these and a broad array of other issues related to the geography of poverty."

The conference will coincide with another conference, titled "Poverty, Precarity and Work: Struggle and Solidarity in an Era of Permanent(?) Crisis," held at UC Davis School of Law. This second conference will take place November 14-15. Visit law.ucdavis.edu/class-crits for more information.