Author: Kevin Russell

...

...

...

In today's unanimous opinion in Orff v. United States, the Court held that farmers in California could not sue the federal government in a water dispute because Congress had not waived the government's sovereign immunity to such suits. The case involves a 1963 contract between the United States Bureau of Reclamation, which operates a series of federal water projects in California, and the Westlands Water District, an entity that, in turn, sells water to farmers in California's Central Valley. In the 1990s, the Bureau cut in half the amount of water it was delivering to the Water District in response to new federal statutes requiring the Bureau to protect endangered fish in the waterways administered by the Bureau. The Water District, in turn, had substantially less water to provide to the farmers. The Water District and the farmers sued the Bureau for breach of the 1963 contract, but the Bureau eventually settled with the Water District, leaving only the farmers' claims.

...

...

This morning the Court sent an interesting case back to the Eighth Circuit for reconsideration and did so in an interesting way. The petition in Klingler v. Director, Dep’t of Revenue, No. 04-585, sought review of a decision from the Eighth Circuit that held that Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), was unconstitutional to the extent it prohibited Missouri from imposing a $2 surcharge on parking placards that allow people with disabilities to park in handicap parking spaces. The court held that Congress lacked the power under the Fourteenth Amendment or the Commerce Clause to prohibit such a surcharge. Today, the Court granted the petition, vacated the court of appeals’ decision, and remanded the case for reconsideration of the Court’s recent decision in Gonzales v. Raich , No. 03-1454 (which upheld Congress’s power to prohibit possession of medical marijuana under the Commerce Clause) and its decision from last term in Tennessee v. Lane , No. 02-1667 (which held that Title II of the ADA was valid Fourteenth Amendment legislation as applied to disability discrimination in access to courts and judicial services). [Disclosure: I worked on this case in the court of appeals when I was at the Justice Department]. The GVR in light of Lane is a bit of slap in the face to the Eighth Circuit because the court of appeals already had a chance to reconsider its decision in light of Lane but chose not to. Lane was decided after the panel decision in Klingler, but both the plaintiffs and the United States as intervenor petitioned for rehearing, asking the court to reconsider its Fourteenth Amendment holding in light of Lane. Without comment, the court of appeals denied the petitions.

...

Today, the Court granted cert. in the consolidated cases of United States v. Georgia, No. 04-1203, and Goodman v. Georgia, No. 04-1236, to resolve whether Congress validly abrogated the States’ sovereign immunity to prisoner claims under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Both petitions arise from the same Eleventh Circuit decision holding the abrogation unconstitutional. (The first petition was filed by the United States, which intervened to defend the constitutionality of the abrogation below, and the second from the plaintiff himself). The case was discussed in detail here at the time the petitions were filed in March. The petitions are available here and here. [Disclosure: I had some involvement in the United States' petition in this case when I was working for the Government, and also worked on the the Goverment's response to the cert. petition in Klingler v. Director, Missouri Department of Revenue, No. 04-585, discussed below]. In brief, the case arises from a lawsuit filed by Tony Goodman, a Georgia inmate confined to a wheelchair due to spinal injuries. Goodman alleges that because of his disability, he is kept in the maximum security wing of the prison and left in his 12-by-3-foot cell for 23-24 hours a day. And because the cell is not wheelchair accessible, he cannot turn his chair around in his cell and cannot access the toilet without assistance, which is frequently denied. Goodman also alleges that because of accessibility problems, he has been denied access to religious services and the prison law library, as well as other prison programs. Goodman brought suit under Title II of the ADA, which prohibits disability discrimination in the programs, services and activities of public entities. In Pennsylvania Dep’t of Corrections v. Yeskey, 524 U.S. 206 (1998), the Supreme Court held that as a matter of statutory construction, Title II applies to discrimination in prisons, but left open whether the statute fell with Congress’s enumerated powers. Last Term, the Court held that Title II fell within Congress’s power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment as applied to discrimination relating to access to judicial services in Tennessee v. Lane, 541 U.S. 509 (2004). But the Court left open whether the same would be true of Title II’s application to other contexts.

The Court heard oral argument this morning in Cutter v. Wilkinson, No. 03-9877, a case involving a constitutional challenge to the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). The issues in the case are thoroughly discussed in this prior post. In short, RLUIPA requires state prison officials to provide accommodations to inmates’ religious practices unless they have a compelling state interest in refusing the request and cannot satisfy that interest through a less restrictive means. The Court took the case to review a decision by the Sixth Circuit that held that by requiring accommodations for religious, but not for secular, reasons, RLUIPA violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Establishment Clause Defending the statute, Acting Solicitor General Paul Clement was not particularly challenged when he repeatedly asserted that the Constitution permits Congress and the States to provide special accommodations for religion without automatically violating the Establishment Clause, even when the First Amendment would not itself require the accommodation. But he was challenged whether this particular statute goes too far by imposing strict scrutiny on prison officials’ denial of requests for accommodations, particularly in light of the Court’s prior conclusion in Employment Div. v. Smith, that the Free Exercise Clause itself only subjects such denials to rational basis scrutiny. When Congress attempted to overturn that decision by enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) pursuant to its authority to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court struck it down as an illicit attempt to change the meaning of the Constitution, a point the Chief Justice made as soon as Clement began his argument. RLUIPA is different than RFRA, Clement argued, because the statute is more targeted (applying only to land use regulation and institutionalized persons, whereas RFRA applied to all government conduct) and because it only applies to States that chose to accept federal funds for their prisons (whereas RFRA applied to all states whether they consented to it or not).