In United States v. Rahimi, the Supreme Court reversed the Fifth Circuit’s invalidation of a firearms-possession law, cautioning against a view of history that “trapped in amber” the world of the 1790s.

Nathan v. Alamo Heights ISD, a 9-7 opinion from the en banc Fifth Circuit, holds that a Texas law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments is constitutional, based on a history-focused test that considers state establishment of an official religion as the purpose of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. No. 25-50695 (April 21, 2026).

The questions whether (1) the Supreme Court’s Stone case from 1980, which is directly contrary to Nathan, continues to have precedential effect, and (2) whether the courts become “trapped in amber” by focusing on history to resolve a question about public schools, when nothing resembling modern public schools existed in the 1790s, seem likely to attract Supreme Court review. (Comments on a morning TV interview can be seen here.)

If you are a fan of the Moonshiners TV show, then McNutt v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice is for you. The Fifth Circuit summarized: “For more than 150 years, Congress has prohibited home distilleries as an adjunct to the law establishing a federal excise tax on distilled spirits. …  [W]hile venerable, the statute violates the Constitution’s Taxation and Necessary and Proper clauses.”

Specifically, the Court held that prohibiting individuals from distilling spirits at home is not “plainly adapted” to Congress’s enumerated power to tax distilled spirits. The statutes do not facilitate tax collection—rather, they prevent the creation of taxable products altogether. Citing McCullogh v. Maryland, the Court emphasized that “the Necessary and Proper Clause cannot expand the reach of the taxing power to criminalize conduct that could produce taxable revenue under the pretext that generating revenue for the federal government will be enhanced.”

The Court also held that the law is not “proper” because it effectively exercises a general police power reserved to the states, rather than legitimately carrying into execution the federal taxation power. In sum, the Court was that the government’s theory lacked a meaningful limiting principle, allowing Congress to ban virtually any home-based conduct on the mere possibility that it might conceal taxable activity. No. 24-10760; Apr. 10, 2026

In Arnesen v. Lutnick, the Fifth Circuit addressed whether members of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council are officers of the United States, who must be appointed pursuant to the Appointments Clause.

Applying the “significant authority” test from Lucia v. SEC, the Court held that only one power — the Council’s ability to veto certain actions by the Secretary of Commerce, including the repeal of fishery management plans — conferred significant authority on Council members. The Council’s other powers (authority to propose plans and amendments, to assemble the supporting record, and to request emergency regulations) did not rise to that level, because the Secretary kept ultimate review and control over them.

From there, the Court severed those provisions, and concluded that the Council’s residual powers made its members mere “advisors or employees and not subject to the Appointments Clause”. Severance was appropriate because (1) the statute can function independently without the veto power, and (2) Congress’s core purpose of informed, cooperative fishery management remains in place. And because the unconstitutional veto provisions were not exercised in developing the fishery-management amendment at issue, the Court held that the implementing regulation “need not be vacated either.” No. 24-60055 (Mar. 27, 2026).

After the panel majority’s decision in Ford v. McKesson, a long-running case is headed for trial. Officer John Ford sued DeRay Mckesson, alleging that he was injured during a protest led by McKesson.

The majority held that summary judgment was improper because a jury could reasonably find for Ford on each part of his Louisiana negligence claim. In the court’s view, the record contains enough evidence for a jury to decide whether Mckesson helped organize and lead the Baton Rouge protest, whether he did so in a way that foreseeably created a violent confrontation with police, and whether that conduct was a but-for cause of Ford’s injuries. The court also rejected the argument that the First Amendment bars the case from reaching trial.

A dissented argued that the plaintiff’s proof, whatever may have been enough at the pleading stage, is too thin at summary judgment. In her view, the majority stacks inference upon inference about Mckesson’s role, causation, and the identity of the rock-thrower. She also warned that allowing the case to proceed risks chilling protest activity by turning disorderly reactions of others (a “heckler’s veto”) into a basis for speaker liability. No. 24-30494 (March 19, 2026).

Based on the Supreme Court’s recent Jarkesy opinion about jury-trial rights and administrative tribunals, the Fifth Circuit required a deceptive-advertising claim to proceed before a jury in Intuit v. FTC:

Caselaw from soon after the passage of the FTC Act reflects a widespread understanding that the statute encompassed common law actions for “deceit,” “fraud,” and “unfair use.” Deceptive advertising claims enforceable by the FTC arose from these traditional concepts. As former FTC Chair Timothy Muris put it, the Commission “help[s] to reinforce the common law rules of exchange” when it acts under its authority to “stop unfair or deceptive acts or practices.” Precedent, particularly the Jarkesy decision, confirms that FTC’s adjudication of deceptive advertising claims does not involve public rights, and the agency must therefore redress deceptive advertising in Article III courts. 

No. 24-60040-CV, March 20, 2026 (citation omitted) (Editor’s Note: as for the above picture of a 1790s-era jury, I tried, but ChatGPT can only conjure up so much diversity when it comes to hats and Colonial neckwear.)

In Cambric v. City of Corpus Christi, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a § 1983 claim against a municipality for failure to adequately plead municipal liability under Monell. The plaintiff alleged that the city engaged in selective enforcement of its building code in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and sought to hold the city liable based on a “pattern, practice, and custom” of selective enforcement.

The Court held that the plaintiff’s allegations were insufficient to establish an actionable custom for municipal liability purposes. Although the plaintiff cited one instance of allegedly unequal treatment—the city’s support for a different historical restoration project—the court found this comparison inadequate to demonstrate a pattern of constitutional violations.

A concurrence clarified that the court’s recent decision in Hershey v. City of Bossier City, which allowed a single-incident Monell claim to survive dismissal on a failure-to-train theory, should not extend to claims alleging that policymakers selectively enforced a statute or ordinance. No. 25-40126, Mar. 13, 2026

Two recent opinions – one from the Fifth Circuit, one from the Southern District of Texas – have addressed constituaional challenges to state education laws, and turned on issues of procedure.

In Roake v. Brumley, the Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, vacated a preliminary injunction against Louisiana House Bill 71, which requires public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. The court did not rule on whether the law is constitutional; instead, it held that the challenge was not ripe for judicial decision because the statute confers discretion on local school boards regarding the nature of the displays, and the full context of how the law will be implemented remains unknown. Dissenting opinions would have addressed the merits.

And in GSA Network v. Morath – a district court opinion on an issue that is likely to reach the Fifth Circuit at some point – the court enjoined the Houston, Katy, and Plano Independent School Districts, barring them from enforcing several provisions of Senate Bill 12, a law regulating clubs, curriculum, and policies related to sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools. The court found that the three school districts, though actively implementing SB 12, explicitly declined to defend the law on the merits, filing only brief responses that took “no position” on its constitutionality, creating a waiver under party-presentation principles. And although the Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency did offer a defense, the court dismissed him from the case for lack of standing, finding that the plaintiffs’ injuries were traceable to the school districts themselves—not the Commissioner—because SB 12 vests implementation and enforcement authority in local school boards.

Hignell-Stark v. City of New Orleans returns to the seemingly evergreen topic of short-term rental regulation by the City of New Orleans. These are some of the holdings reached:

• Equal Protection. The Fifth Circuit struck down the City’s categorical ban on business entities holding owner or operator permits. Because natural‑person owners and juridical‑person owners are similarly situated for purposes of STR permitting, the City’s prohibition on business‑held licenses could survive only if it bore a rational relationship to a legitimate governmental interest. The court found none. The City’s livability and neighborhood‑character concerns relate to guest conduct and on‑site oversight, not the legal identity of the permittee.And the Court disagreed that corporate form would impede enforcement or increase administrative burdens, noting that the Code already limits concentration through one‑permit‑per‑block and one‑permit‑per‑person rules.
• First Amendment. The Court distinguished between permissible disclosure requirements and impermissible content restriction. It upheld requirements that STR ads include factual, uncontroversial information such as permit numbers, accessibility details, and bedroom/occupancy counts, as well as prohibitions on advertising unpermitted or over‑capacity rentals. By contrast, the rule that “each short‑term rental listing advertises only one dwelling unit” failed, because the City did not say how the “one‑unit‑per‑ad” limitation directly advances a substantial interest or why it is no more extensive than necessary, and the Curt declined to supply post hoc justifications.

No. 24-30160; Oct. 7, 2025

Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980), holds:

“Posting of religious texts on the wall  serves no such educational function. If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.“

Consistent with that precedent, in Roake v Brumley, a Fifth Circuit panel affirmed an injunction against a Louisiana law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in school classrooms, Nevertheless, the full Court has voted to take the case en banc (interestingly, a somewhat overheated effort to get immediate en banc review of this case was rejected 14-3 soon after the trial court’s ruling was appealed.

Providing fuel both to those who argue (a) that the claimed invasion of the United States by rogue Venezuelans is not, in fact, a high-priority item on the national agenda, and also to those who argue that (b) that the judiciary moves too deliberately to meaningfully engage questions of national security, the Fifth Circuit has voted to rehear en banc the case of W.M.M. v. Trump, about the President’s power to order certain deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

I&I Hair v. Beauty Plus The Fifth Circuit rejected a takings claim against the City of Mesquite when that claim arose from the “alleged ‘thwarting of [plaintiffs’] previously approved development and reimbursement rights” governed by their contracts with the City and the Management District.”

The plaintiffs argued that the City had to have acted in its sovereign capacity because “only a governmental entity acting in its governmental or sovereign capacity can change the regulations and rules mid-stream ….”

The Court disagreed: “Although only government entities can alter a regulatory scheme, any party to a contract may attempt—or refuse—to renegotiate the terms of an
agreement midstream. In such circumstances, any resulting dispute is contractual. That conclusion does not change merely because the party is a governmental entity.”

Mesquite Asset Recovery Group v. City of Mesquite, No. 24-11025 (Sept. 23, 2025).

Salvador Dali mused about the malleable nature of time in his painting The Persistence of Memory.

Similarly, a Biden-era dispute between the Texas and federal governments, addressing an aggressive state statute about immigration enforement, was resolved by a 2-1 panel opinion in favor of federal preemption in United States v.Texas.

Despite the change of Administrations–and with it, a massive budget increase for ICE that drastically expanded federal immigration enforcement–this Biden-era remannt will now be reheard en banc later this year or early next.

SpaceEx v. NLRB holds that the National Labor Relations Board’s “for-cause” removal protection for its five Members is likely unconstitutional because the Board, unlike the 1935 Federal Trade Commission, “is not a ‘mirror image’ of the FTC.” In the Fifth Circuit’s view, the Board wields extensive executive power—adjudicating unfair-labor-practice charges, directing elections, and petitioning federal courts for injunctions—yet lacks any statutory party-balancing requirement. Those differences place the NLRB outside the narrow safe harbor created by Humphrey’s Executor.

A dissent argued that an injunction should not issue absent proof that the contested provisions actually harmed the employers. No. 24-50627 (Aug. 19, 2025). (Mr. Humphrey appears above; history does not seem to have recorded an image of his executor.)

Quorum issues have vexed efforts to have a special Texas legislative session in 2025. Meanwhile, in State v. Bondi, a Fifth Circuit panel majority held that the House may constitutionally count Members who vote by proxy toward a quorum. It reasoned that the U.S. Constitution’s Quorum Clause “does not require physical presence,” emphasizing that the Constitution speaks only of a “majority” and leaves each chamber broad discretion to decide how to “ascertain the fact” of that majority.

Specially, the Court concluded that remote‐participation rules adopted during the pandemic merely supply a permissible method for determining whether enough Members are participating, not a redefinition of the quorum itself. Because the underlying legislative record indisputably showed that more than half the House either voted or authorized a proxy to do so, the court declared that “the Constitution’s text, history, and tradition support remote voting and counting proxies as sufficient for quorum.”

The panel warned that reading the Constitution to demand physical presence would empower a minority to block legislation and “undermine the very purpose of the Quorum Clause: to ensure majoritarian rule.”

A dissent argued that the Quorum Clause’s reference to “compel[ling] the Attendance of absent Members” and more than two centuries of congressional practice show that a quorum exists only when a majority are physically in the chamber. By allowing the House to satisfy the quorum requirement with paper proxies, the dissent argued, the court stripped the Clause of its structural safeguard against minority rule and permitted Congress to “define the Constitution’s quorum requirement out of existence.” No. 24-10386, Aug. 15, 2025,

In DM Arbor Court, Ltd.. v. City of Houston, the Fifth Circuit held that the City’s denial of repair permits under its flood control ordinance constituted a categorical taking under the Supreme Court’s Lucas framework.

After the Arbor Court apartment complex was severely damaged by flooding, the City refused to issue repair permits unless the buildings were elevated to meet new floodplain requirements—a cost the court found to be “prohibitively expensive” and “economically unfeasible.” Both the property owner’s and the City’s experts agreed that, under these conditions, there was “no economically viable, or feasible, or beneficial use of the property.” The Fifth Circuit stated, “Saying that a property’s only remaining use is to hope for future development is the same as saying that the property must remain idle today. That is a categorical taking under Lucas.”

A dissent argued that the district court’s analysis was correct, emphasizing that Lucas takings are reserved for the “extraordinary case” where a regulation “permanently deprives property of all value. No. 23-20385, Aug. 12, 2025

Palms v. Texas Childrens Hospital, a case about religious objections to a flu vaccine, produced a difference of opinion as to whether the plaintiff’s accommodation claim had been forfeited.

The majority held that the plaintiff had forfeited her argument by failing to adequately brief how the district court erred in granting summary judgment, emphasizing that she “never states that TCH’s offered accommodation was unreasonable or explains why the district court could not dismiss her claim on this ground.” Citing established precedent, the majority reasoned that a party forfeits an argument by failing to “offer any supporting argument or citation to authority” or to “identify relevant legal standards and any relevant Fifth Circuit cases.”

The dissent contended that the plaintiff’s opening brief sufficiently challenged the timing and adequacy of the hospital’s accommodation, expressly arguing that the hospital’s delay in granting an accommodation was unreasonable and resulted in her being “impermissibly ‘suspended without pay’ due to her religious beliefs.” The dissent criticized the majority’s approach as a “legal trick-box” that would deprive employees of the ability to pursue meritorious claims of religious discrimination simply because the employer eventually ceased the challenged conduct. No. 24-20174, Aug. 11, 2025

In Wright v. Honeywell Int’l, a Title VII case about a COVID vaccination requirement, the Fifth Circuit held (citations omitted):

Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to Wright and drawing all reasonable inferences in his favor, a reasonable jury could find that Wright held at least a mixed motive for his vaccine refusal: a bona fide religious belief alongside political beliefs and personal preference. Wright’s evidence demonstrates a “moral or ethical” belief in bodily autonomy and freedom to choose what to put in his body.  The fact that he gave additional reasons for his vaccine refusal does not show that his belief is “merely a preferred practice.”  Instead, it simply shows that his vaccine refusal is grounded on both religious and nonreligious reasons. Furthermore, the inquiry on this prong is not “whether [Wright’s specific] belief is a true religious tenet” of the Baptist faith, but rather whether the belief is, “in his own scheme of things, religious.” Because a plaintiff’s sincerity in espousing a religious practice “is largely a matter of individual credibility,”  Wright’s evidence would be better weighed by a jury than by the court at the summary judgment stage.

A footnote considers whether future Supreme Court opinions may exclude “purely moral or ethical beliefs” from the protection of Title VII; cf. U.S. Const. amend. I (creating some tension when guarding against both “respecting an establishment of religion” and “prohibiting the free exercise thereof”).

A prescient Fifth Circuit panel opinion, perceiving the mismatch between somewhat-dated First Amendment precedent and the realities of modern-day adult entertainment, was affirmed on the last day of the Supreme Court term, albeit by using a different level of scrutiny. Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, No. 23-1122 (U.S. June 27, 2025). Texas’s age-verification laws for access to adult sites will stand; interest in proxy server technology will likely increase substantially.

Last term, the Supreme Court reversed a Fifth Circuit opinion that held the CFPB’s structure violated the Constitution because it was “double insulated” from the annual appropriations process.

The unfortunate track record of “double” arguments continued in this term, when the Supreme Court reversed an en banc Fifth Circuit opinion holding that the FCC’s collection of univeral-service fees amounted to impermissible “double-layered delegation” of Congressional power. The Supreme Court reasoned:

The court’s analogy and associated logic do not work. In Free Enterprise Fund, each of the two layers of for-cause protection limited the same thing—the President’s power to  remove executive officers. And when combined, each compounded the other’s effect, so that the President was left with no real authority. Or otherwise said, the two layers of restrictions operated on a single axis with the one exacerbating (we thought exponentially) the other. But that reasoning has no bearing here. A law violates the traditional (or call it, for comparison’s sake, “public”) nondelegation doctrine when it authorizes an agency to legislate. And a law—whether a statute or, as here, a regulation—violates the private nondelegation doctrine when it allows non-governmental entities to govern. Those doctrines do not operate on the same axis (save if it is defined impossibly broadly). So a measure implicating (but not violating) one does not compound a measure implicating (but not violating) the other, in a way that pushes the combination over a constitutional line. “Two wrong claims do not make one that is right.”

No. 24-354 (U.S. June 27, 2025) (citations omitted).

Accurately applying the present state of the law, a Fifth Circuit panel in Roake v. Brumley affirmed a preliminary injunction against a Louisiana law requiring display of the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms. It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will change the state of the controlling law. No. 24-30706 (June 20, 2025).

The once-obscure Court of International Trade – once an Article I tribunal, but “promoted” to Article III status in 1956 – took issue with the legal basis for many of the Trump Administration’s tariffs.

Specifically, in V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. United States, that court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act’s authorization for the President to “regulate . . . importation” does not confer unbounded tariff authority: “[T]his court reads ‘regulate . . . importation’ to provide more limited authority so as to avoid constitutional infirmities and maintain the ‘separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government’ that is ‘essential to the preservation of liberty.'”

The opinion went on to distinguish between the President’s emergency powers and more narrowly tailored statutory authorities, such as those found in the Trade Act of 1974, which specifically limit the President’s ability to impose tariffs in response to trade deficits or other economic concerns. Nos. 25-00066 & 25-00077, May 28, 2025

Now that a Texas trial-court opinion has issued about deporting suspected Venezuelan gang members, the issue appears headed to the Fifth Circuit.

After affirmance of the Fifth Circuit in SEC v. Jarkesy, that Court returned to the interaction between the Seventh Amendment and the admininistrative state in AT&T Inc. v. FCC. The specific issue was whether the FCC’s  in-house enforcement procedures for imposing civil penalties violate the constitutional right to a jury trial, as clarified by Jarkesy.

The court held that the FCC’s process ran afoul of the Seventh Amendment, emphasizing that these civil penalties are “the prototypical common law remedy,” designed to punish or deter, and thus “a type of remedy at common law that could only be enforced in courts of law.” In particular, and FCC enforcement action under section 222 of the Telecommunications Act resembles a negligence action, as it centers on whether the carrier took “reasonable measures” to protect customer data, notwithstanding the technical nature of the factual situation.

The Court also rejected the FCC’s argument that the availability of a later trial in federal court—after the agency has already found liability and imposed penalties—satisfies the Seventh Amendment. In such a trial, explained the Court, the defendant cannot challenge the legal conclusions of the agency, only the factual basis, and that this structure forces companies to choose between a jury trial and the ability to challenge the legality of the order. No. 24-60223, Apr. 17, 2025. (A third judge concurred without opinion).

The complaint recently filed by Susman Godfrey in the District of the District of Columbia about a recent executive order is a powerful work of advocacy.

The hapless plaintiff in Villarreal v. City of Laredo continues to be out of court. After winning in the Supreme Court on the viability of her First Amendment retaliation claim, the Fifth Circuit affirmed dismissal based on qualified immunity.

The majority opinion emphasized that the events in question occurred in 2017, predating a 2019 Supreme Court decision on the topic; as of 2017, the Supreme Court’s precedent held that there was no clearly established right to be free from a retaliatory arrest supported by probable cause.

A concurrence questioned whether qualified immunity should apply when the constitutional right is clear but the remedy is not, suggesting that the rationale for qualified immunity may not hold in cases where officials have ample time to make decisions, as opposed to split-second judgments.

A dissent argued that in light of the Supreme Court’s opinion, remand to the trial court for consideration in the first instance of qualified immunity was appropriate. No. 20-40359, Apr. 8, 2025.

After the Supreme Court said in no uncertain terms that litigation about deportments under the Alien Enemies Act would proceed by habeas in the place of detention, the first lawsuit was filed and this TRO resulted – inevitably headed to the Fifth Circuit.

Venue disputes—specifically, between courts in Washington DC and those in the Fifth Circuit—are again on the horizon as a result of challenges to aggressive use of immigration-related laws by the Trump Administration.

In yesterday’s case of J.G.G. v. Trump, the D.C. Circuit denied an emergency motion to stay TROs against the use of the Alien Enemies Act to detain and remove Venezuelan citizens. No. 25-5067 (D.C. Cir. March 26, 2026). While the operative judgment of the panel comprises only a one-page order, each of the three judges wrote an opinion (two concurrences and one dissent), as follows:

• Judge Karen Henderson noted that the Act grants the President near-blanket authority to detain and deport noncitizens affiliated with a belligerent state during times of war or invasion.  However, she underscored the necessity of judicial oversight, stating, “The Alien Enemies Act sets forth ‘conditions upon which it might be invoked’ but is silent as to ‘how long the power should last when properly invoked.'”
• Judge Patricia Millett argued that the government’s position, which would allow for the summary removal of individuals without any opportunity for judicial review, was fundamentally at odds with the Constitution’s guarantee of due process.
• Judge Justin Walker’s dissent contended that the plaintiffs’ claims should have been brought in the Southern District of Texas, where they were detained, rather than in the District of Columbia.  He also argued that the district court’s orders interfered with sensitive national security operations.

In a famous dissent from a death-penalty case, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote: “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death ….”

Others have continued such tinkering, however, leading to the macabre question presented in Hoffman v. Westcott — whether the Eighth Amendment forbids execution by “nitrogen hypoxia” sa opposed to a firing squad.

The panel majority held that this question was for the state to resolve; the dissent, for the district judge based on the preliminary-injunction record. No. 25-70006-CV (March 14, 2025).

The recent vote against en banc review in Repub. Nat’l Comm. v. Wetzel, a case about the acceptable time frame for counting mail-in ballots, produced this configuration of votes and opinions:

Bruen, Rahimi, and their history-focused perspective on the Second Amendment led to a firearms restriction being held unconstitutional because:

“[T]he text of the Second Amendment includes eighteen-to-twenty-year-old individuals among ‘the people’ whose right to keep and bear arms is protected. The federal government has presented scant evidence that eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds’ firearm rights during the founding-era were restricted in a similar manner to the contemporary federal handgun purchase ban, and its 19th century evidence ‘cannot provide much insight into the meaning of the Second Amendment when it contradicts earlier evidence.'”

Reese v. BATF, No. 23-30033-CV (Jan. 31, 2025) (citation omitted). (A demographer would note that the average lifespan in the 1790s was about 40 years, providing some perspective on the framers’ views about aging, although that number is likely skewed downward by the high infant mortality of the time.)

Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980), holds:

“Posting of religious texts on the wall  serves no such educational function. If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.“

Unsurprisingly, then, the Fifth Circuit voted 14-3 on December 30 to reject an overly enthuastic application for en banc hearing in Roake v. Brumley – the challenge to a Louisiana law about display of the Ten Commandments that is flatly inconsistent with the above Supreme Court holding.

Repub. Nat’l Comm. v. Wetzel  held that a Mississippi statute, allowing absentee ballots to be received up to five days after Election Day, is preempted by federal law, which mandates that all ballots must be received by Election Day. The court emphasized that the term “Election Day” refers to a singular day. Slate’s Mark Stern offers some provocative commentary about the potential impact – or lack thereof – of this ruling. No. 24-60395, Oct. 25, 2024.

In Tesla, Inc. v. Louisiana Automobile Dealers Assoc., the Fifth Circuit addressed Tesla’s challenges to Louisiana’s automobile dealership regulations, which prohibit manufacturers from selling directly to consumers and performing warranty services for cars they do not own.

• Due Process. The Court found that Tesla had plausibly alleged a due process violation. The Commission’s composition, with members who are direct competitors of Tesla, created a “possible personal interest” that could bias their decisions, which was sufficient for the Rule 12 stage.
• Antitrust. From there, the Court vacated and remanded the dismissal of Tesla’s antitrust claim, noting that the due process ruling fundamentally altered the grounds on which Tesla’s alleged antitrust injury was based. Tesla’s allegations of exclusion from the market due to the Commission’s actions could constitute a plausible antitrust injury.
• Equal Protection. The Court affirmed dismissal of Tesla’s equal protection claim, concluding that preventing vertical integration and potential abuses of market power were legitimate state interests justifying the regulations.

A dissent saw matters differently, focusing primarily on the due-process claim and its reliance on board structure. No. 23-30480, August 26, 2024.

The en banc court has ruled for Texas in the ongoing “border buoy” dispute, with a breakdown of votes as follows:

In 2022, the Fifth Circuit held that the CFPB’s funding was “double insulated” from Congressional review, and thus violated the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution.

In a recent 7-1 opinion by Justice Thomas, the Supreme Court reversed and held otherwise. Notably, “double” or “doubly” appears nowhere in the Supreme Court’s majority or concurring opinions. The Court held that “an identified source and purpose are all that is required for a valid appropriation.”

Now, Consumers’ Research v. FCC, a 9-7 en banc opinion from the Fifth Circuit, doubles down on this line of argument, holding that the method used to calculate a “universal service fee” for the communication industry is unconstitutional as a “double-layered delegation” of power. The dissent observes that “Congress has provided the FCC with an intelligible principle that sufficiently delimits the FCC’s discretion based on the established universal service principles.” No. 22-60008 (July 24, 2024) (en banc).

The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act of 2020, and its novel use of a private entity (the “Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority”) to make and enforce rules for horse racing, did not fare well on a previous visit to the Fifth Circuit. A return trip received a more favorable reception:

In sum, we affirm the district court’s judgment that (1) Congress’s recent amendment to HISA cured the private nondelegation flaw in the Authority’s rulemaking power; (2) HISA does not violate due process; (3) the Authority’s directors are not subject to the Appointments Clause under Lebron; and (4) Gulf Coast lacks standing to challenge HISA on anticommandeering grounds. We reverse the district court’s judgment in one respect. Insofar as HISA is enforced by private entities that are not subordinate to the FTC, we DECLARE that HISA violates the private nondelegation doctrine.

National Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Association v. Black, No. 22-10387 (July 5, 2024). The private-nondelegation holding creates a split with the Sixth Circuit.

Fifth Circuit affirmed in SEC v. Jarkesy:

A defendant facing a fraud suit has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers before a neutral adjudicator. Rather than recognize that right, the dissent would permit Congress to concentrate the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the hands of the Executive Branch. That is the very opposite of the separation of powers that the Constitution demands. Jarkesy and Patriot28 are entitled to a jury trial in an Article III court.

No. 22-859 (U.S. June 27, 2024).

The Supreme Court reversed the Fifth Circuit’s judgment in Murthy v. Missouri, a case about interaction between the federal government and social-media platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Again, the ground of reversal with standing, with the Supreme Court finding that the plaintiff’s claim of future injury was too attenuated, and that a “right-to-listen” theory of standing was not viable. No. 23-411 (U.S. June 26, 2024).

In 2022’s Bruen opinion, the Supreme Court disapproved of “means-ends” analysis in Second Amendment cases:

In today’s Rahimi opinion, the Supreme Court walked that disapproval back, while nominally following the same history-based test:

The result was an 8-1 reversal of the Fifth Circuit opinion holding that the subject of a domestic protective order had a Second Amendment right to carry a firearm. (I argued that the Fifth Circuit’s opinion took “history” too far in this Dallas Morning News editorial last year.)

“Double, double, toil and trouble,” chanted the three witches of Macbeth.  “Double insulated,” said the Fifth Circuit in CFSA v. CFPB, holding that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism was so far removed from Congress’s ordinary appropriations process that it violated the Appropriation Clause of the Constitution. Parting company with the above, the Supreme Court didn’t use the word “double” in reversing the Fifth Circuit, and holding that the CFPB is appropriately funded, considering history and practicality. CFPB v. CFSA, No. 22-448 (U.S. March 16, 2024).

The Fifth Circuit’s recent en banc vote in Consumers’ Research v. CPSC, an unsuccessful constitutional structure to the Consumer Product Safety Commission in light of recent Supreme Court precedent, is summarized in the below chart. The vote was accompanied by a concurrence and two dissenting opinions.

The surprisingly slippery question whether Texas law allows a takings claim to proceed against the state came to an anticlimactic end with the Supreme Court’s opinion in DeVillier v. Texas:

As Texas explained at oral argument, its state-law inverse-condemnation cause of action provides a vehicle for takings claims based on both the Texas Constitution and the Takings Clause. …  And, although Texas asserted that proceeding under the state-law cause of action would require an amendment to the complaint, it also assured the Court that it would not oppose any attempt by DeVillier and the other petitioners to seek one.

No. 22-913 (U.S. April 16, 2024).

After an earler (unexplained) grant of an administrative stay touched off weeks of fast-paced appellate litigation about Texas’s “SB4” immigration law, a majority of the Fifth Circuit’s merits panel denied any further stay of the trial court’s injunction against enforcement of that law. USA v. Texas, No. 24-50149 (March 26, 2024). Argument is scheduled next week; barring Supreme Court intervention, merits opinions similar to these are likely.

This morning’s Supreme Court arguments in the mifepristone cases (which will be available here when ready) lead to a couple of observations about legal issues of the day:

1. Standing. As the Washington Post effectively summarized: “A majority of justices from across the ideological spectrum expressed skepticism that the antiabortion doctors challenging the government’s loosening of regulations have sufficient legal grounds — or standing — to bring the lawsuit.” (Last year, I wrote about the “conservative” approach to standing in high-profile constitutional cases in a Slate article, and the application of basic standing principles in the mifepristone cases in this Dallas Morning News editorial.)
2. Comstock. Justice Holmes famously observed: “The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky.” But the Comstock Act is, and Congress should do something about the law before its 1870s-era moralism is inflicted on modern society. Mark Stern’s X feed on the mifepristone arguments summarizes some of the present state of play.

In the 1950s, Big Tobacco advertised the safety of “Kent with the Micronite Filter,” which was unfortunately made with an exceptionally dangerous form of asbestos. After decades of advertising bans and mandatory disclosures, the battle over cigarette ads continues, leading most recently to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. v. FDA – a First Amendment challenge to new, more graphic disclosures about the potential harms of smoking.

The Fifth Circuit rejected the challenge (reversing a contrary district-court opinion) and remanded for consideration of claims involving the Administrative Procedure Act. As to the First Amendment issues, the Court summarized:

When determining whether Zauderer applies, (1) images can be factual; (2) ideological or emotion-inducing statements are not per se controversial or non-factual; (3) “uncontroversial” means not subject to good-faith dispute about the accuracy of the factual statement; and (4) legitimate state interests other than the prevention of consumer deception are cognizable under Zauderer. For the reasons detailed above, the district court erred by finding Zauderer inapplicable to the FDA’s newest Warnings. Applying Zauderer, the Warnings survive constitutional muster against the First Amendment challenge.

No. 23-40076 (March 21, 2024).

In United States v. Abbott, Texas contends that the Rio Grande is not navigable, which allows it to place a floating barrier in the river to deter navigation. After a Fifth Circuit panel affirmed the district court’s injunction against the barrier, the Court voted to take the case en banc, after which the district court placed the underlying case on a rapid schedule. Texas sought a stay, which the en banc Court denied for a variety of reasons:

The mifepristone litigation – recently selected by Law360 as the most notable case of 2023 from the Fifth Circuit – will be heard by the Supreme Court. While it did not grant the petition about the original approval of mifepristone, a wide range of significant issues–including important standing questions, and the modern viability of the Comstock Act–are ripe for decision as part of the granted petitions:

Whatever your views of the remarkable civil-rights issue presented by Wilson v. Midland County (the intersection between some highly technical immunity rules and the bizarre injustice of a county employee working simultaneously for the prosecution and the courts), one can admire the deft prose of Jude Willett’s opinion:

Eschewing exotic constitutional issues about a state’s rights to engage in military activity, the Fifth Circuit affirmed a preliminary injunction requiring Texas to remove an obstacle from the Rio Grande, citing the federal government’s exclusive authority as to navigable waters. United States v. Abbott, No. 23-50632 (Dec. 1, 2023). A dissent had a different view; some serious consideration of en banc review is likely.

In Louisiana Creole cooking, gumbo is a flavorful, roux-based soup made with the ingredients available to the chef. Similarly, Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment v. SEC addresses a host of constitutional issues of the day, including the questions whether a board-membership disclosure requirement by Nasdaq can be “state action”; whether the SEC’s approval of such a rule exceeded its statutory authority (including the subsidiary questions whether that action infringed on state sovereignty or involved a “major question”); and whether the SEC properly assessed the relevant record in reaching its conclusion. Unusual for the Fifth Circuit, the panel consisted of three judges appointed by Democratic presidents. It remains to be seen what the view of the full court will be on these matters. No. 21-60626 (Oct. 18, 2023).

The remand of Collins v. Yellen, 141 S. Ct. 1761 (2020) did not end well for the plaintiffs, as the district court concluded that they “had not plausibly alleged that the removal restriction” on FHFA’s director caused them harm. The plaintiffs made a valiant effort to bring the case within the scope of a recent Fifth Circuit holding about the Appropriations Clause, but the Fifth Circuit found that its holding in that case did not create a change in the relevant law that was sufficient to overcome the mandate rule. Collins v. Dep’t of the Treasury, No. 22-20632 (Oct. 12, 2023).

The Supreme Court has granted review of three social-media regulation cases, one of which is the 2022 2-1 panel opinion by the Fifth Circuit in Netchoice v. Paxton, which conflicts with a 2022 opinion from the Eleventh Circuit about similar subject matter. These are the two issues referenced in the Court’s order granting review:

The Fifth Circuit’s mifepristone opinion has been released (although the trial court’s order remains stayed by an earlier ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court) – of particular interest is the panel majority deciding not to address the issue presented about the Comstock Act:

I discuss the importance of this point in a recent article in Slate, as does Professor Mary Ziegler in another Slate piece.

Just a few days before the Supreme Court’s opinion in 303 Creatiive, a Fifth Circuit panel reached a similar result in a related setting (here, the hiring and workpace practices of a church and a “Christian business”):

[W]e decide that RFRA requires that Braidwood, on an individual level, be exempted from Title VII because compliance with Title VII post-Bostock would substantially burden its ability to operate per its religious beliefs about homosexual and transgender conduct. Moreover, the EEOC wholly fails to carry its burden to show that it has a compelling interest in refusing Braidwood an exemption, even post-Bostock.

Braidwood Management v. EEOC, No. 22-10145 (June 20, 2023).

In May 2022, a Fifth Circuit panel held in Jarkesy v. SEC that the Seventh Amendment’s right to civil jury trial extends to an SEC enforcement action. The full Fifth Circuit later denied en banc review of the matter.

Critics of the administrative state celebrated the ruling as an important limit on agency power; others questioned whether “originalism” was fairly applied to an agency and a set of statutes that did not exist in 1792.

On June 30 of this year, the Supreme Court granted review of Jarkesy, which will be a fascinating addition to the next term of that court:

The high-profile police-shooting case of Edwards v. City of Balch Springs ended with an affirmance of dismissal on qualified-immunity grounds. Among other holdings, the opinion succinctly captures the challenge in scrutinizing official use-of-force policies in this setting:

“[A] written policy is not facially unconstitutional just because it leaves out ‘detailed guidance that might have averted a constitutional violation.’ If it were otherwise, a use-of-force policy would be facially constitutional only if it recited every jot and tittle of the applicable caselaw. Surmounting that logistical hurdle would produce a behemoth free of any practical use—less a policy than a treatise.”

No. 22-10269 (June 9, 2023).  (The phrase “jot and tittle,” btw, has a Biblical origin related to pen strokes used to write Hebrew.)

Despite skepticism in other opinions about vaccination programs in response to the COVID pandemic (especially when religious-liberty issues are in play), the Fifth Circuit reversed and rendered judgment for a prison doctor who administered an antipsychotic drug to a dangerous prisoner. The Court reasoned, inter alia: “[E]mergency  circumstances justify the abbreviation or elimination of pre-deprivation procedures like hearings.” Pinkston v. Kuiper, No. 21-60320 (May 4, 2023) (per curiam).

Without reference to the Federalist Papers or the records from the Constitutional Convention, the Fifth Circuit held in Consumers’ Research v. FCC that the six criteria in 47 U.S.C. § 254(b) gave the FCC “intelligible principles” to guide its regulation of communication, unlike the “total absence of guidance” identified last year in Jarkesy v. SEC, 34 F.4th 446 (5th Cir. 2022). No. 22-60008 (March 24, 2023).

The original panel opinion in Devillier v. State of Texas, No. 21-40750 (Nov. 28, 2022) (footnotes omitted), said that in federal court “the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment does not provide a right of action for takings claims against a state,” but in state court, “[t]he Supreme Court of Texas recognizes takings claims under the federal and state constitutions, with differing remedies and constraints turning on the character and nature of the taking ….” Devillier v. State of Texas, No. 21-40750 (Nov. 28, 2022) (footnotes omitted).

The panel revised its opinion in January to say only: “The State of Texas appeals the district court’s decision that Plaintiffs’ federal Taking Clause claims against the State may proceed in federal court. Because we hold that the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment does not provide a right of action for takings claims against a state, we VACATE the district court’s decision and REMAND for further proceedings. Nothing in this opinion is intended to displace the Supreme Court of Texas’s role as the sole determinant of Texas state law.” A detailed footnote described the Texas Supreme Court’s holdings in this area.

An en banc vote proceeded, which produced an 11-5 vote against rehearing, released on March 23, 2023:

The en banc Fifth Circuit affirmed a nationwide injunction against President Biden’s federal-employee vaccine mandate, concluding that the relevant statute did allow federal jurisdiction over such issues. The breakdown of opinions in Feds for Medical Freedom v. Biden is as follows:

Last year the Fifth Circuit held that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was funded through an unconstitutional mechanism that circumvented the Congressional appropriations process. That matter is now before the Supreme Court. The Second Circuit has now joined the fray in CFPB v. Law Offices of Crystal Moroney, P.C., No. 20-3471 (March 23, 2023), joining the D.C. Circuit in finding that the CFPB’s funding mechanism does not violated the Appropriations Clause.

The Fifth Circuit updated its panel opinion in United States v. Rahimi. The holding  remains the same (that the federal law, criminalizing the possession of a firearm by someone subject to a domestic violence protective order, violates the Second Amendment), but the majority opinion adds explanation about what its holding does, and does not, affect. No. 21-11001 (March 2, 2023) (withdrawing and substituting prior opinion).

While I wrote an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News about the original opinion, noting that the Fifth Circuit had found the same statute constitutional under the pre-Bruen Second Amendment framework, I had not fully grasped the contrast until reading the revised opinion. The Fifth Circuit’s previous opinion turned on “means-end scrutiny” — in other words, a comparison of benefit and burden. The present opinion thus finds this law unconstitutional (as it must under its analysis of Bruen) even though Circuit precedent says that the law did not unduly burden gun rights when compared to the law’s policy objectives. It thus provides a particularly stark example of the impact of Bruen‘s history-only framework on the law in this area.

A case now pending in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas challenges the FDA’s approval of one of the drugs commonly used to carry out a “medication abortion,” including a question whether the 19th-Century Comstock Act prohibits the mailing of abortion-related medication.  A decision is expected after preliminary-injunction briefing closes on February 24. This is the plaintiffs’ brief in support of a preliminary injunction, and this is the defendants’ response.

Referring to a federal law that prohibits firearm ownership by someone subject to a domestic-violence restraining order, the Fifth Circuit holds in United States v. Rahimi:

“Doubtless, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8) embodies salutary policy goals meant to protect vulnerable people in our society. Weighing those policy goals’ merits through the sort of means-end scrutiny our prior precedent indulged, we previously concluded that the societal benefits of § 922(g)(8) outweighed its burden on Rahimi’s Second Amendment rights. But Bruen forecloses any such analysis in favor of a historical analogical inquiry into the scope of the allowable burden on the Second Amendment right. Through that lens, we conclude that § 922(g)(8)’s ban on possession of firearms is an ‘outlier[] that our ancestors would never have accepted.’ Therefore, the statute is unconstitutional, and Rahimi’s conviction under that statute must be vacated.

No. 21-11001-CR (Feb. 2, 2023) (citation omitted).

In a time of well-documented skepticism in the federal courts about the administrative state, the FTC has doubled down, seeking public comment on a rule that would ban enforcement of noncompetition agreements.

As part of the explanation for its authority, the FTC cited authority that “Section 5 reaches conduct that, while not prohibited by the Sherman or Clayton Acts, violates the spirit or policies underlying those statutes.” That broad language will sound familiar to readers of the vaccine-mandate cases and their discussions of the EEOC’s rulemaking authority.

Given the present climate in the courts about expansive claims of agency authority, it seems likely that any FTC rule in this area will lead to extensive litigation before such a rule actually takes effect.

In Louisiana v. Biden, No. 22-30019 (Dec. 19, 2022), a panel majority invalidated a Presidential vaccination mandate, holding: “This so-called ‘Major Questions Doctrine’ – that is, that ‘[w]e expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of vast economic and political significance,’ – serves as a bound on Presidential authority.” (citation omitted, emphasis added, applying West Virginia v. EPA, 142 S. Ct. 2587 (2022)).

A dissent saw matters otherwise. A commentator in Slate criticized the expansion of the major questions doctrine to actions by the executive branch. On this general topic, I’ve suggested in Law360 that the major questions doctrine may have the unintended consequence of justifying Congressional restrictions on Article III jurisdiction.

12-3 (one recusal), the full Fifth Circuit denied en banc review in Freedom From Religion Foundation v. Mack, in which the panel found no coercion (and thus no standing) in a challenge to a Texas JP’s pre-court practices.

By a 9-7 vote, the Fifth Circuit declined to review en banc the panel opinion in Seekins v. United States. Under well-established Circuit precedent, Seekins presented a straightforward application of a criminal statute about possession of ammunition that had moved in interstate commerce. The petitioner directly challenged that precedent, arguing that it rested on an overly broad reading of Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce. Plainly, the close vote signals the Court’s willingness to reconsider longstanding concepts about that constitutional provision. The breakdown of votes is below:

In federal court, “the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment does not provide a right of action for takings claims against a state,/” but in state court, “[t]he Supreme Court of Texas recognizes takings claims under the federal and state constitutions, with differing remedies and constraints turning on the character and nature of the taking ….” Devillier v. State of Texas, No. 21-40750 (Nov. 28, 2022) (footnotes omitted).

The plaintiffs in National Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Ass’n v. Black sought to rein in the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, a private entity created by Congress in 2020 – nominally under FTC oversight – to nationalize the regulation of thoroughbred horseracing.  The Fifth Circuit scratched HISA, finding it facially unconstitutional as an excessive private delegation of federal-government power:

A cardinal constitutional principle is that federal power can be wielded only by the federal government. Private entities may do so only if they are subordinate to an agency. But the Authority is not subordinate to the FTC. The reverse is true. …  HISA restricts FTC review of the Authority’s proposed rules. If those rules are “consistent” with HISA’s broad principles, the FTC must approve them. And even if it finds inconsistency, the FTC can only suggest changes. … An agency does not have meaningful oversight if it does not write the rules, cannot change them, and cannot second-guess their substance.

No. 22-10387 (Nov. 18, 2022) (citations omitted, emphasis added).

For those who had doubts about the matter, Foley Bey v. Prator confirms that the search of a fez is protected by qualified immunity if conducted as part of courthouse security, notwithstanding the plaintiffs’ appeal to the U.S.-Morocco Friendship Treaty of 1836. (The digital image to the right could be called a hi-res fez.) No. 21-30489 (Nov. 17, 2022).

In the 1985 classic, “Return of the Living Dead,” a rainstorm spreads a zombie-creating chemical throughout a city. In 2022, the Supreme Court’s relentless focus on originalism in cases like Dobbs has also awakened long-dead legal doctrines (even as it put to bed the prospects for a “Red Wave” in 2022’s Congressional elections).

Such a resurrection can be seen in the concurrence from Golden Glow Tanning Salon v. City of Columbus, No. 21-60898 (Nov. 8, 2022), which advocates an examination of a “right to earn a living” in light of how such economic matters were understood in the late 1700s.

Of course, that phrasing is precisely how the Supreme Court described the issue in Lochner v. New York, the long-discredited 1905 opinion that struck down a maximum-hour restriction in the baking industry:

“Statutes of the nature of that under review, limiting the hours in which grown and intelligent men may labor to earn their living, are mere meddlesome interferences with the rights of the individual ….”

The Supreme Court abandoned Lochner in the 1930s when laissez-faire ideas proved useless in the face of a systemic failure of capitalism itself. There is, of course, ample room for argument about the proper role of government in the economy.  But the invocation of “originalism” to simply ignore Lochner ‘s failure is not consistent with the recognized best practices for battling zombies.

The Fifth Circuit recently declined to review Jarkesy v. SEC en banc; the division of votes was as follows (names in blue were appointed by a Democratic president; red, by a Republican one):

CFSA v. CFPB finds – again – that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutionally structured, but this time because its “double insulated” funding mechanisms violated the Appropriations Clause by circumventing Congress’ “power of the purse.” The arguments about that fundamental Constitutional provision are intriguing and seem likely to draw the Supreme Court’s interest. No. 21-50826 (Oct. 19, 2022). The Fifth Circuit’s treatment creates a split with seven other federal courts, including PHH Corp. v. CFPB, 881 F.3d 75 (D.C. Cir. 2018). A recent Slate article offered criticism of the opinion.

The opinion also presents a rare appearance of the word “magisterial” to describe an earlier case on this topic:       Cf. Herman Hesse, “Magister Ludi” (1943).

It’s been a busy fall for the Dormant Commerce Clause. In addition to the Fifth Circuit’s recent invalidation of a Texas law about the ownership of electricity-generation facilities, the Court also struck down a New Orleans residency requirement for the ownership of Vrbo-type rental properties:

The district court held that the residency requirement discriminated against interstate commerce. That was the right call. But the court then applied the Pike test [for an incidental effect] to uphold the law. That was a mistake; it should have asked whether the City had reasonable nondiscriminatory alternatives to achieve its policy goals. Because there are many such alternatives, the residency requirement is unconstitutional under the dormant Commerce Clause.

Hignell-Stark v. City of New Orleans, No. 21-30643 (Aug. 22, 2022).

In addition to the Court’s holding about the dormant Commerce Clause, NextEra Energy Capital v. Lake explained why the plaintiff’s claim based on the Commerce Clause was properly rejected (with citations omitted, although the citations are valuable and instructive):

          One of the original Constitution’s only express limitations on state power, it directs that “No State shall … pass any …  Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” The Contracts Clause was a response to the state laws relieving debtors during the 1780s. In the first century or so of the Republic, before the Bill of Rights restricted states, the Contracts Clause was “the primary vehicle for federal review of state legislation.”  Some of the greatest hits of the antebellum Supreme Court were Contracts Clause cases.

          But unlike the dormant Commerce Clause, the Contracts Clause is not what it once was. The Supreme Court substantially narrowed its scope during the Great Depression. Under modern caselaw, states have some leeway to alter parties’ contractual relationships “to safeguard the vital interests of [their] people.”

          A related principle that has sapped the Contracts Clause of its earlier force applies here. We now recognize that parties contract with an expectation of possible regulation. That is especially true in highly regulated industries like power. That history of regulation put NextEra on notice that Texas could enact additional regulations affecting its two projects.  After Order 1000, there was substantial uncertainty about how state regulators would respond.

          Despite PUCT’s declaration that transmission-only companies could enter the market, Texas courts never weighed in on the issue. Moreover, the emergence of state rights of first refusal signaled that Texas could enact something similar, if not more restrictive.

No. 20-50160 (Aug. 30, 2022).

“Imagine if Texas—a state that prides itself on promoting free enterprise—passed a law saying that only those with existing oil wells in the state could drill new wells. It would be hard to believe. It would also raise significant questions under the dormant Commerce Clause. …

Texas recently enacted such a ban on new entrants in a market with a more direct connection to interstate commerce than the drilling of oil wells: the building of transmission lines that are part of multistate electricity
grids. A 2019 law says that the ability to build, own, or operate new lines “that directly [connect] with an existing utility facility . . . may be granted only to the owner of that existing facility.” …

NextEra challenges the new law, as it applies to the interstate electricity networks in Texas (but not the intrastate ERCOT network), on dormant Commerce Clause grounds. … Once we wade through the thicket of electricity regulation, the ban’s interference with interstate commerce becomes as clear as it is for the oil well hypothetical. We thus conclude that the dormant Commerce Clause claims should proceed past the pleading stage.”

NextEra Energy Capital v. Lake, No. 20-50160 (Aug. 30, 2022) (citations omitted).

The 2017 collision between the MV ACX Crystal and the destroyer U.S. Fitzgerald led to litigation in New Orleans federal court against NYK, a huge shipping concern with global operations. The district court acknowledged that for this international case, the constitutional standard for personal jurisdiction was based on the Fifth rather than the Fourteenth Amendment, but concluded that the standards were materially similar and that it lacked jurisdiction over NYK.

A Fifth Circuit panel affirmed and the en banc court did also, noting that the other Circuits addressing this constitutional question reached similar conclusions. A dissent argued that the majority’s position about jurisdiction would undermine the effective operation of Congressionally-created causes of action involving asset seizure by the Castro regime and terrorist activity. Douglass v. NYK, No. 20-30382 (Aug. 16, 2022) (en banc). The judges’ votes broke along atypical lines and are detailed below:

Robinson v. Ardoin addressed whether to stay a preliminary injunction in a highly technical Voting Rights Act case about Louisiana’s congressional districts. The Court’s analysis of timeliness is of general interest in preliminary injunction practice involving similar situations (a board election or vote, etc.), even though some of the policy interests involved are unique to elections for public office. The key facts were:

• The primary election at issue was five months away; the deadline for a candidate to qualify for that election by paying a fee was approximately a month away, which was the path chosen by most candidates;
• While “multiple mailings could confuse some voters,” there was “[m]ore than enough time … for the state to assuage any uncertainty,” especially when no one had yet cast a ballot; and
• While “administrative burdens” related to equipment maintenance and voter-roll review were legitimate concerns, evidence showed that the state had significant administrative experience in adjusting to changes in the time, place, and manner of elections.

No. 22-30333 (June 12, 2022).

By a close vote, the Supreme Court vacated the Fifth Circuit’s order that stayed the trial court’s preliminary injunction in the Netchoice litigation about Texas’s social-media statute.

If Woodrow Wilson and James Landis seem alarmed in the picture to the right, it may be that they had a premonition about the Fifth Circuit’s 2021-22 skepticism toward the structure of the SEC. Following a 2021 loss in Cochran v. SEC on a procedural issue about constitutional challenges to the work of the SEC’s Administrative Law Judges (featuring a blistering critique of the administrative state in a concurrence by Judge Oldham, and as to which the Supreme Court has recently granted certiorari), the Court again reached constitutional issues in Jarksey v. SEC, holding:

“(1) the SEC’s in-house adjudication of Petitioners’ case violated their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial; (2) Congress unconstitutionally delegated legislative power to the SEC by failing to provide an intelligible principle by which the SEC would exercise the delegated power, in violation of Article I’s vesting of “all” legislative power in Congress; and (3) statutory removal restrictions on SEC ALJs violate the Take Care Clause of Article II [of the Constitution].”

Judge Elrod wrote the panel majority opinion, joined by Judge Oldham. Judge Davis dissented as to each holding. These holdings have obvious significance to other administrative agencies and could well again draw Supreme Court attention. No. 20-61007 (May 18, 2022).

A Fifth Circuit motions panel granted Texas’ request to stay a preliminary injunction against that state’s law about content moderation by major social media platforms; commentators suggest that a rapid Supreme Court appeal will now occur. (The asterisk below indicates that the ruling was not unanimous. No opinion has issued yet; argument was just conducted on May 9th.)

The saying “that’s all she wrote” was particularly apt for the Fifth Circuit yesterday, as the hard-fought litigation brought by abortion providers to challenge Texas’s SB8 took its final turn back to the district court:

Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, No. 21-50792 (April 26, 2022).

Reversing the Fifth Circuit’s opinion in City of Austin v. Reagan Nat’l Advertising, 972 F.3d 696 (5th Cir. 2020), the Supreme Court held that Austin’s use of an “on-/off-premises distinction” did not create a content restriction. The majority opinion reasoned:

A sign’s substantive message itself is irrelevant to the application of the provisions; there are no content-discriminatory classifications for political messages, ideological messages, or directional messages concerning specific events, including those sponsored by religious and nonprofit organizations. Rather, the City’s provisions distinguish based on location: A given sign is treated differently based solely on whether it is located on the same premises as the thing being discussed or not. The message on the sign matters only to the extent that it informs the sign’s relative location. The on-/off-premises distinction is therefore similar to ordinary time, place, or manner restrictions.

No. 20-1029 (U.S. April 21, 2022) (applying Reed v. Gilbert, 576 U.S. 155 (2015)).

“Plaintiffs who succeed in winning a money judgment against a state governmental entity in state court in Louisiana often find themselves in a frustrating situation. Though they have obtained a favorable judgment, they lack the means to enforce it. The Louisiana Constitution bars the seizure of public funds or property to satisfy a judgment against the state or its political subdivisions. Instead, the Legislature or the political subdivision must make a specific appropriation in order to satisfy the judgment. And since Louisiana courts lack the power to force another branch of government to make an appropriation, the prevailing plaintiff has no judicial mechanism to compel the defendant to pay. …

Finding themselves in this position, the Plaintiffs in this case, like others before them, have turned to the federal courts to force payment on their state court judgment. They claim that the Defendants’ failure to timely satisfy a state court judgment violates the Takings Clause of the Fifth
Amendment. The district court granted the Defendants’ motion to dismiss, applying long-standing precedent that there is no property right to timely payment on a judgment.”

The Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal. Ariyan, Inc v. Sewarage & Water Board of New Orleans, No. 21-30335 (March 21, 2022) (citations omitted); cf. generally Preston Hollow Capital v. Cottonwood Devel. Corp., 23 F.4th 550 (5th Cir. 2022) (also affirming dismissal of takings claim).

Trafigura Trading v. United States featured a dispute about one of the many prohibitions in Article I Section 9 of the Constitution; specifically, clause 5, which says: “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.” An oil company argued that a federally-imposed charge on oil exports, collected to finance the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, violated this provision.

The district court ruled for the oil company and a Fifth Circuit panel affirmed. One judge, drawing heavily from lyrics made famous by “Hamilton,” described the surprisingly colorful history of this provision, and voted to affirm. Another judge voted to affirm but declined to join that opinion. And the third judge dissented. As a result, the other opinion had no quorum supporting it and thus lacked precedential effect.  No. 21-20127 (March 24, 2022).

On that broader subject, cf. Sambrano v. United Airlines, No. 21-11159 (Feb. 17, 2022) (Smith, J., dissenting) (sympathizing with “the hapless trial judge or conscientious advocate” that must reason from nonprecedential rulings); see generally Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 78 (May 28, 1788) (“To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts, it is indispensable that they should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them; and it will readily be conceived from the variety of controversies which grow out of the folly and wickedness of mankind, that the records of those precedents must unavoidably swell to a very considerable bulk, and must demand long and laborious study to acquire a competent knowledge of them.”).

The long shadow of Edward Young (right), who served as Minnesota’s well-mustachioed Attorney General in the early 20th century, fell upon two companion cases about Texas election laws, in which a panel majority found that the Texas Secretary of State was not a proper defendant under Ex Parte Young.  A dissent (from both panel opinions) saw matters otherwise:

I write to remind failing memories of the signal role of Ex parte Young in directly policing the path of cases and controversies to the Supreme Court from our state and federal courts and warn against its further diminution. … ‘Ex parte Young poses no threat to the Eleventh Amendment or to the fundamental tenets of federalism. To the contrary, it is a powerful implementation of federalism necessary to the Supremacy Clause, a stellar companion to Marbury and Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee.’

…

The majority continues this Court’s effort to shrink the role of Ex parte Young, by overly narrow readings of the state officer’s duty to enforce Texas’s election laws. … [T]he Texas Secretary of State is the “chief election officer of the state” and is directly instructed by statute to “obtain and maintain uniformity in the application, operation, and
interpretation of this code and of the election laws outside this code.” Moreover, the Secretary is charged to “take appropriate action to protect the voting rights of the citizens of this state from abuse by the authorities administering the state’s electoral processes” and “to correct offending conduct.” Although recent decisions by this Court have split hairs regarding the level of enforcement authority required to satisfy Ex parte Young, the Secretary is charged to interpret both the Texas Election Code and the election laws outside the Code, including federal law, to gain uniformity, tasks it is clearly bound to do. The allegation in these cases is that the Secretary is failing in that duty. This charge should satisfy our Ex parte Young inquiry.

TARC v. Scott, No. 20-40643 (March 16, 2022); Richardson v. Flores, No. 20-50744 (March 16, 2022) (footnotes and citations omitted). (I was recently interviewed about the case by KDFW-TV in Dallas.)

While expediting consideration of the merits, a Fifth Circuit panel declined to stay a national injunction against a vaccination requirement for federal employees; a detailed dissent would have granted an interim stay of the injunction. Feds for Medical Freedom v. Biden, No. 20-30090 (Feb. 11, 2022). A thorough (albeit, highly partisan) article about the case recently appeared in Slate.

In a rough stretch for the administrative state, after the Fifth Circuit’s recent skeptical rejection of an FDA regulation of e-cigarettes, another panel stayed OSHA’s vaccine-mandate regulation. It based its decision on several administrative-law principles and summarized:

“[T]he Mandate’s strained prescriptions combine to make it the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive (applying to employers and employees in virtually all industries and workplaces in America, with little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse) and underinclusive (purporting to save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a “grave danger” in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat). The Mandate’s stated impetus—a purported “emergency” that the entire globe has now endured for nearly two years, and which OSHA itself spent nearly two months responding to—is unavailing as well. And its promulgation grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority.”

No. 21-60845 (Nov. 12, 2021) (footnotes omitted, emphasis in original).

“It should be obvious to any reasonable police officer that locking up a journalist for asking a question violates the First Amendment. Indeed, even Captain Lorenzo, the stubborn police chief in Die Hard 2, acknowledged: ‘Now personally, I’d like to lock every [expletive] reporter out of the airport. But then they’d just pull that “freedom of speech” [expletive] on us and the ACLU would be all over us.”  Die Hard 2 (1990).                                        Captain Lorenzo understood this. The officers in Laredo should have, too. Cf. Dickerson v. United States, 530 U.S. 428, 443 (2000) (‘Miranda has become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture.’). The complaint here alleges an obvious violation of the First Amendment. The district court erred in holding otherwise.”

Villarreal v. City of Laredo, No. 20-40359 (Nov. 1, 2021).

A frequent international traveler alleged that he had been placed on a TSA list that required additional, invasive searches of him when he flew. The Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of the several Constitutional claims that he raised in a lawsuit against the leaders of the relevant federal agencies:

“In short, Ghedi has no right to hassle-free travel. In the Supreme Court’s view, international travel is a ‘freedom’ subject to ‘reasonable governmental regulation.’ And when it comes to reasonable governmental regulation, our sister circuits have held that Government-caused inconveniences during international travel do not deprive a traveler’s right to travel. In the Sixth Circuit’s view, ‘incidental or negligible’ delays of ‘ten minutes’ to ‘an entire day’ do not ‘implicate the right to travel.’ The Second and Tenth Circuits have held the same. Ghedi has therefore failed to plausibly allege that he has been deprived of his right to travel internationally by the extra security measures he has experienced.”

Ghedi v. Mayorkas, No. 20-10995 (Oct. 25, 2021) (footnotes omitted).

In a challenge to the constitutionality of the “eviction moratorium,” the federal government argued that the case had become moot because the specific order at issue had expired. The Fifth Circuit expressed skepticism:

“Appellees respond that the appeal is not moot because the parties still dispute whether the government has constitutional power under the Commerce Clause to invade individual property rights by limiting landlords’ use of state court eviction remedies. The government maintains it has such authority. And in the government’s view, espoused at oral argument, that constitutional power is in no way limited to combatting the ongoing pandemic; the government asserts it can wield that staggering constitutional authority for any reason. Appellees further contend the proposed dismissal is a pretext to avoid appellate review of the constitutional question.”

(emphasis added). The court concluded, however, that it did not need to address mootness because it was granting the government’s motion to dismiss “on terms . . . fixed by the court” under FRAP 42. Those terms included the “express condition” that ‘”our dismissal does not abrogate the district court’s judgment or opinion, both of which remain in full force according to the express concession of the government during oral argument and in briefing.” Terkel v. Centers for Disease Control, No. 21-40137 (Oct. 19, 2021) (One panelist joined the result only.)

The Fifth Circuit denied the stay application in the appeal of the DOJ’s lawsuit against SB8, stating:While the referenced Fifth Circuit opinion primarily focused on Ex Parte Young (not relevant in a suit by the US, see West Virginia v. United States, 479 U.S. 305 (1987)), it made other observations about justiciability that this order suggests will now be central in the resolution of the merits. Professor Steve Vladeck further analyzes the relationship of the two cases in a recent Twitter thread.

The Fifth Circuit recently released its opinion on the emergency-stay motions of early September in the high-profile challenge to Texas’s “heartbeat law,” Whole Womens Health v. Jackson, No. 21-50792 (Sept. 10, 2021). In addition to identifying problems with the application of Ex parte Young, the Court observed: “We do not even take into account the many other justiciability defenses Defendants have raised beyond Young. Defendants have argued powerfully that, not only do they enjoy Eleventh Amendment immunity, but federal jurisdiction is also lacking under Article III. Related doctrines of standing, ripeness, and justiciability are also likely to prevail because these Plaintiffs have no present or imminent injury from the enactment of S.B 8.” 

Applying Keller v. State Bar of California, 491 U.S. 1 (1990), the Fifth Circuit concluded that certain activities by the State Bar of Texas were not “germane” to the Bar’s accepted purpose, and thus held that their funding with bar dues violated the First Amendment.

In sum, the Bar is engaged in non-germane activities, so compelling the plaintiffs to join it violates their First Amendment rights. There are multiple other constitutional options: The Bar can cease engaging in nongermane activities; Texas can directly regulate the legal profession and create a voluntary bar association, like New York’s; or Texas can adopt a hybrid system, like California’s. But it may not continue mandating membership in the Bar as currently structured or engaging in its current activities.

The Court acknowledged the “weakened foundations” of Keller after the union-dues case of Janus v. Am. Fed. of State, County, & Municipal Employees, 138 S. Ct. 2448 (2018), but concluded that it still framed the relevant issues in the context of a mandatory bar association. McDonald v. Longley, No. 20-50448 (July 2, 2021). The Texas Lawbook has written on the opinion. (The companion case of Boudreaux v. Louisiana State Bar Ass’n, No. 20-30086 (July 2, 2021), reversed a standing-based dismissal to a similar challenge to the activities of Louisiana’s state bar.)

Huawei Technologies USA v. FCC presents an exhaustive summary of modern-day administrative law, in the context of reviewing an FCC rule that excluded Huawei from federal funds as a security risk. As the Court summarized its several holdings:

Their most troubling challenge is that the rule illegally arrogates to the FCC the power to make judgments about national security that lie outside the agency’s authority and expertise. That claim gives us pause. The FCC deals with national communications, not foreign relations. It is not the Department of Defense, or the National Security Agency, or the President. If we were convinced that the FCC is here acting as “a sort of junior varsity [State Department],” Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361, 427 (1989) (Scalia, J., dissenting), we would set the rule aside.

 

But no such skullduggery is afoot. Assessing security risks to telecom networks falls in the FCC’s wheelhouse. And the agency’s judgments about national security receive robust input from other expert agencies and officials. We are therefore persuaded that, in crafting the rule, the agency reasonably acted within the broad authority Congress gave it to regulate communications.

No. 19-60896 (June 18, 2021).

The Supreme Court reversed a Fifth Circuit panel opinion about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, finding that none of the plaintiffs had standing in light of (1) the repeal of coverage-related penalties and (2) the apparent mismatch between the ACA provisions complained of as unconstitutional, and those that caused the complained–of harms to the states. California v. Texas, No. 19-840 (U.S. Jun 17, 2021) (reversing Texas v. United States, 945 F. 3d 355 (5th Cir. 2019)).

Canfield v. Lumpkin presented an ineffective-assistance claim arising from voir dire. The record showed the following exchange with the juror in question, followed by general questions to the panel about the ability ot be fair, with no individual followup questioning of this juror:

The panel majority found no error sufficient to justify habeas relief, as well as a lack of sufficient prejudice. A dissent saw matters otherwise: “[T]he trial judge and counsel were acutely aware of the necessary care that must attend jury selection and the challenges of this case. Our question is whether they succeeded in protecting the jury room. Unlike the majority, I conclude that they did not. During voir dire, a prospective juror volunteered that she felt the defendant was guilty and would probably vote to convict him even if the State failed to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Neither counsel nor the judge followed up with her. So, she served on the jury that first convicted Jerry Lee Canfield and, then, free to choose from a menu of sentences from  5 years to life imprisonment, sentenced him to 50 years in prison without the possibility of parole.” No. 18-10431 (May 18, 2021).

Roe v. Wade famously named Dallas County DA Henry Wade (right) as its defendant, because he was the official charged with enforcement of the criminal statute at issue. The Texas Legislature has passed a new abortion law — a “heartbeat bill” — that features a novel enforcement procedure involving private litigants. The statute disclaims any public enforcement, relying on a private right of action against abortion providers that features an extremely broad definition of standing. The Texas Tribune correctly notes that the Fifth Circuit’s en banc opinion in Okpalobi v. Foster, 244 F.3d 501 (5th Cir. 2001), declined to extend Ex Parte Young (left) to a Louisiana statute that created a somewhat-analogous private cause of action against abortion providers. Assuming that the Governor signs the new Texas law, Okpalobi will likely be cited frequently in federal-court challenges to it. (I recently did a an interview with Fox 4’s “Good Day” about this new law.)

The full Fifth Circuit declined to grant en banc review to State of Texas v. Rettig, 987 F.3d 518 (5th Cir. 2021), which involved constitutional challenges by certain states to two aspects of the Affordable Care Act. They contended that the “Certification Rule” violated the nondelegation doctrine, and that section 9010 of the ACA violated the Spending Clause and the Tenth Amendment’s doctrine of intergovernmental tax immunity. The panel found the laws constitutional, in an opinion by Judge Haynes that was joined by Judges Barksdale and Willett. “In the en banc poll, five judges voted in favor of rehearing (Judges Jones, Smith, Elrod, Ho, and Duncan), and eleven judges voted against rehearing (Chief Judge Owen, and Judges Stewart, Dennis, Southwick, Haynes, Graves, Higginson, Costa, Willett, Engelhardt, and Wilson),” with Judge Oldham not participating, and the five pro-rehearing judges joining a dissent.

Several years ago, mathematicians rejoiced at the mapping of the world’s most complex structure, the 248-dimension “Lie Group E8” (right). Not to be outdone, the en banc Fifth Circuit has issued  Brackeen v. Haaland, a 325-page set of opinions about the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act–a work so complicated that a six-page per curiam introduction is needed to explain the Court’s divisions on the issues. No. 18-11479 (April 6, 2021). The splits, opinions, and holdings will be reviewed in future posts.

Louisiana bar owners contended that a state COVID restriction violated the Equal Protection Clause. The Fifth Circuit disagreed:

“Unlike AG-permitted bars whose primary purpose is to serve alcohol, AR-permitted businesses must serve more food than alcohol to meet their monthly revenue requirements. Even if the Bar Closure Order’s classifications are based solely on the premise that venues whose primary purpose and revenue are driven by alcohol sales rather than food sales are more likely to increase the spread of COVID-19, such a rationale, as described by Dr. Billioux and the Governor and credited by both district courts, is sufficiently ‘plausible’ and not ‘irrational.”’ … [T]he Bar Closure Order’s differential treatment of bars operating with AG permits is at least rationally related to reducing the spread of COVID-19 in higher-risk environments.”

Big Tyme Investments, LLC v. Edwards, No. 20-30526 (Jan. 13, 2021) (citations omitted). The panel majority and a concurrence disputed the exact import of archaic-sounding language from Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), but did not find it to materially impact the outcome under traditional Equal Protection principles.

The Twelfth Amendment says: “The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” By statute, that is to occur this year on January 6. That statute also lays out a procedure for handling objections to votes. Judge Jeremy Kernodle of Tyler rejected a challenge to that process, as the process is in detailed in  Section 15 of 1887’s Electoral Count Act, stating: “Plaintiff Louie Gohmert, the United States Representative for Texas’s First Congressional District, alleges at most an institutional injury to the House of Representatives. Under well settled Supreme Court authority, that is insufficient to support standing.”  Gohmert v. Pence, No. 6:20-cv-660-JDK (E.D. Tex. Jan. 1, 2020).

A Fifth Circuit motions panel (Higginbotham, Smith, Oldham) dismissed an effort at immediate appeal:

In Williams v. Reeves, 953 F.3d 729 (5th Cir. 2020), “[t]he plaintiffs in this lawsuit are low-income African-American women whose children attend public schools in Mississippi. They filed suit against multiple state officials in 2017, alleging that the current version of the Mississippi Constitution violates the ‘school rights and privileges’ condition of the [1870] Mississippi Readmission Act.”  A Fifth Circuit panel found that ” a portion of the relief plaintiffs seek is prohibited by the Eleventh Amendment,” but that “the lawsuit also partially seeks relief that satisfies the Ex parte Young exception to sovereign immunity.” The full court recently denied en banc review by an 8-9 vote; the votes are described below, and they are identical to the split in another recent vote. (Red and blue show the political party of the nominating President, and an * indicates former service as a trial judge.)

In striking down a regulation of casket-making by a Louisiana monastery, the Fifth Circuit assured: “Nor is the ghost of Lochner lurking about.” St. Joseph Abbey v. Castille, 712 F. 3d 215, 226-27 (5th Cir. 2013). Nevertheless, that fearsome shade surfaced in Hines v. Quillivan, an equal-protection challenge to Texas’s regulation of telemedicine by veterinarians, only to be banished by the panel majority: “It is not irrational for a state to change in stages its licensing laws to adapt to our new, technology-based economy. If the Texas legislature finds the recently enacted changes on telemedicine successful, it may decide to expand those changes to include veterinarians. It is reasonable to have a trial period rather than to make a hasty policy change. Though we could conceive no rational basis for the law challenged in St. Joseph Abbey, we can conceive many rational bases here.”

A dissent saw matters differently, crediting the plaintiff’s argument that “[i]t simply is not rational to allow telemedicine without a physical examination for babies but deny the same form of  telemedicine for puppies on the ground that puppies cannot speak.” No. 19-40605 (revised Dec. 2, 2020).

By an 8-9 vote, the Fifth Circuit abstained from en banc review of McRaney v. North American Mission Board, 966 F.3d 346 (5th Cir. 2020), in which the panel found that the application of the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine was premature given the stage of the parties’ case. A breakdown of the votes is below (the third panel member, Judge Clement, has taken senior status and did not participate in the vote):

“Hard cases make bad law,” says the old adage; whether that holds true for Taylor v. Riojas, will remain to be seen. The Supreme Court reversed a qualified-immunity ruling in a case involving what it saw as “shockingly unsanitary” prison cells, finding that the “extreme circumstances” of the case eliminated any dispute about whether the relevant law was clearly-established. No. 19-1261 (U.S. Nov. 2, 2020) (reversing Taylor v. Stevens, 946 F.3d 211 (5th Cir. 2019).

The dry-sounding issue before the en banc court in Planned Parenthood v. Kauffman, No. 17-50282 (Nov. 23, 2020), was “whether 42 U.S.C. § 1396a(a)(23) gives Medicaid patients a right to challenge, under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a State’s determination that a health care provider is not ‘qualified’ within the meaning of § 1396a(a)(23).”  The practical consequence of that issue, however, is significant–who may sue about Texas’s termination of several Planned Parenthood facilities from that state’s Medicaid program.

The majority held that under a 1980 Supreme Court case and the structure of the statute, the patients did not have the right to sue. In so doing, the Fifth Circuit joined the Eighth Circuit and split with five others. A 7-judge concurrence (2 votes shy of a majority, given the configuration of the en banc court for this case) would have reached the merits and rejected them. The opinions are illustrated in the chart below:

The University of Texas’s rules about campus speech did not fare well in Speech First, Inc. v. Fenves, in which the Fifth Circuit found that a preliminary-injunction action could proceed. The Court found that the case was not moot and stated a strong claim on the merits: “Of course, not every utterance is worth protecting under the First Amendment. In our current national condition, however, in which ‘institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishment instead of considered reforms,’ courts must be especially vigilant against assaults on speech in the Constitution’s care. Otherwise, the people may not be free to generate, debate, and discuss both general and specific ideas, hopes, and experiences,’ to ‘transmit their resulting views and conclusions to their elected representatives,’ ‘to influence the public policy enacted by elected representatives,’ and thereby to realize the political and human common good.”  No. 19-50529 (revised Oct. 30, 2020) (footnotes omitted).

In one of many recent election-law disputes, the panel majority in Richardson v. Hughs painstakingly reviewed, and rejected, the plaintiffs’ challenge to Texas’s practices about signature verification for mail-in ballots. The procedural posture was a motion to stay; a concurrence cautioned: “[T]he reality is that the ultimate legality of the present system cannot be settled by the federal courts at this juncture when voting is already underway, and any opinion on a motions panel is essentially written in sand with no precedential value ….”  footnote omitted). No. 20-50774 (Oct. 20, 2020).

The most recent episode of the Coale Mind podcast discusses Mi Familia Vota v. Abbott, No. 20-50793 (Oct. 14, 2020), a challenge to several Texas voting laws in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The case reminds of two important limits on federal judicial power in such disputes:

• Under Ex parte Young (Mr. Young appears to the right): “Although a court can enjoin state officials from enforcing statutes, such an injunction must be directed to those who have the authority to enforce those statutes. In the present case, that would be county or other local officials.” 
• And naming the right defendant is only the first hurdle posed by federalism: “An examination of the relief that the Plaintiffs seek in the case before us reveals that in many instances, court-ordered-relief would require the Governor or the Secretary of State to issue an executive order or directive or to take other sweeping affirmative action. If implemented by the district court, many of the directives requested by the Plaintiffs would violate principles of federalism.”

Early voting begins today in Texas. The Fifth Circuit stayed the district court’s order that would have let large Texas counties have more than one early-ballot pickup location. The panel majority concluded, inter alia, that the plaintiffs misconstrued the entirety of the Governor’s actions: “The July 27 and October 1 Proclamations—which must be read together to make sense—are beyond any doubt measures that ‘make[] it easier’ for eligible Texans to vote absentee. How this expansion of voting opportunities burdens anyone’s right to vote is a mystery” (citation omitted). From there, the majority concluded that the plaintiffs overstated the claimed burden, and failed to give sufficient weight to the Governor’s asserted interest in preventing voter fraud. A concurrence criticized the Governor’s use of emergency power: “If a governor can unilaterally suspend early voting laws to reach policy outcomes that you prefer, it stands to reason that a governor can also unilaterally suspend other election laws to achieve policies that you oppose.” Texas LULAC v. Hughs, No. 20-50867 (Oct. 12, 2020).

“[C]ourt changes of election laws close in time to the election are strongly disfavored. … [I]n staying a preliminary injunction that would change election laws eighteen days before early voting begins, we recognize the value of preserving the status quo in a voting case on the eve of an election, and we find that the traditional factors for granting a stay favor granting one here.” Texas Alliance for Retired Americans v. Hughs, No. 20-40643 (Sept. 30, 2020).

The Fifth Circuit has ruled in the closely-watched constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act, Texas v. United States, No. 19-10011 (Dec. 18, 2019). The panel majority opinion, written by Judge Elrod and joined by Judge Englehardt, held:

First, there is a live case or controversy because the intervenor-defendant states have standing to appeal and, even if they did not, there remains a live case or controversy between the plaintiffs and the federal defendants. Second, the plaintiffs have Article III standing to bring this challenge to the ACA; the individual mandate injures both the individual plaintiffs, by requiring them to buy insurance that they do not want, and the state plaintiffs, by increasing their costs of complying with the reporting requirements that accompany the individual mandate. Third, the individual mandate is unconstitutional because it can no longer be read as a tax, and there is no other constitutional provision that justifies this exercise of congressional power. Fourth, on the severability question, we remand to the district court to provide additional analysis of the provisions of the ACA as they currently exist.

(emphasis added). Judge King dissented, stating: “I would vacate the district court’s order because none of the plaintiffs have standing to challenge the coverage requirement. And although I would not reach the merits or remedial issues, if I did, I would conclude that the coverage requirement is constitutional, albeit unenforceable, and entirely severable from the remainder of the Affordable Care Act.”