Legal Docket: Unanimous rulings on key rights

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday, the 9th of June.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

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REICHARD: It’s time for Legal Docket.

It’s that very busy time at the Supreme Court during this final month of the term. Five opinions handed down on Thursday, four of them unanimous…in what one court watcher considered “conservative” opinions from liberal justices.

EICHER: It struck me the same way: When the most liberal Supreme Court justice—Sonia Sotomayor—when she writes an opinion on religious liberty and Justice Samuel Alito says, in effect, “yeah, what she says,” that’s got to get your attention, and it has ours. Our first of three really big decisions is the Catholic Charities case.

This one has to do with its legal fight with the state of Wisconsin. All nine justices ruled that the state violated the First Amendment by denying the Catholic nonprofit an exemption from state unemployment taxes.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court said it wasn’t religious enough to suit the state.

REICHARD: Lael Weinberger is an academic fellow at Stanford Law School and a former law clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch. He says the court’s message is crystal clear:

WEINBERGER: So the bottom line ruling is that you can't discriminate on the basis of religion. And the state of Wisconsin was trying to implement a rule that would basically have said that some religious groups got the benefit of a tax exemption effectively, and others wouldn't on the basis of their religious practices, and the Supreme Court said you absolutely cannot discriminate in that way.

Here’s a refresher on the backstory: Catholic Charities Bureau is part of the Diocese of Superior, Wisconsin. It serves the poor, elderly, and disabled regardless of their religious commitments. Catholic Charities paid into the state’s unemployment insurance system for years.

It eventually asked for a religious exemption so it can join a church- run alternative better aligned with Catholic teaching.

EICHER: But Wisconsin said no, arguing Catholic Charities wasn’t “operated primarily for religious purposes.”

To the state, the organization didn’t tick certain boxes to qualify as religious. For example, it doesn’t proselytize or limit its help only to Catholics.

That theme arose during oral argument back in March, with Justice Gorsuch pressing the state’s lawyer with a hypothetical:

GORSUCH: Are you going to go --is Wisconsin going to go around and --and this soup kitchen, you know, you have to go -- you have to go to the service before you get your soup, they're good to go. But that one, they just invite you to the service after the soup, and they're bad. I mean, is it really that's the --I would have thought this would entangle the state in --in religion a whole lot more than a non-discrimination rule between religions.

REICHARD: That narrow view on what qualifies as religious is where the state crossed a line.

Back to the former Gorsuch clerk Weinberger:

WEINBERGER: That's what the majority opinion emphasizes, that the government can't be taking sides on what kinds of religious practices are good and what kinds of religious practices are less favored. And if they're going to say that you get the benefit of a particular tax write off an exemption from a regulatory scheme based on the way that you practice your faith, and the people who who pray more or more publicly or focus more on public ceremony, that they are treated as religious. But if you're going to go and live out your religion in everyday life and try to help people as a way of of living out your faith.

EICHER: That was the approach of Catholic Charities … that Wisconsin saw more as Charities and not so much as Catholic.

Weinberger explained to us that this was the inquiry the state made that the court said the state had no business making.

And even if it were a legitimate state function to judge whether a charitable outreach is a religious one, Wisconsin’s judgment was just wrong to hear Catholic Charities explain its approach. Serving soup to hungry people flows from Catholic teaching, with no need to preach to its clients.

For Lael Weinberger it’s just as well that the government got out of this business—and the court’s unanimity puts an exclamation point on it.

WEINBERGER: It is very encouraging to me to see a unanimous opinion on religious liberty. Because I think over the last few years in particular, there has been a strong sense that many have had that religious liberty has become a partisan issue, and that there has been increasing polarization. And if you roll back the clock 40 or 50 years, you see bipartisan super majorities rallying around religious-liberty issues—whether it's in Congress, in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or whether it's in the courts, where in the 1970s, 1980s, religious-liberty, free-exercise concerns were concerns that were widely shared Amongst liberal justices as well. So it's encouraging to see that here for a clear issue of religious discrimination, there are nine justices. This is not something that divides the court. The court can speak with one voice to that issue.

Bottom line? The court reaffirmed that religious exercise isn’t limited to what happens in a pulpit. It includes faith in action.

REICHARD: In another unanimous ruling, the court threw out a lawsuit brought by Mexico’s government against American gun makers.

Mexico accused Smith & Wesson, Colt, Glock, and others of aiding and abetting illegal gun trafficking. It accused the companies of turning a blind eye as their guns were funneled through American gun dealers to drug cartels in Mexico, reaping destruction there.

But the opinion says Mexico’s complaint just doesn’t hold up. Gunmakers are generally immune from liability for crimes committed with their products.

There’s an exemption if a company knowingly breaks a gun law. But Mexico didn’t plausibly allege that. At most, the gunmakers knew that some dealers were misbehaving. But that amounts to indifference, not assistance. What the law requires, the Court said, is “active participation” in specific illegal gun sales.

EICHER: The third big opinion is Ames v Ohio Department of Social Services. This one says that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act applies to everyone. Whether you’re in a minority group or majority group makes no difference.

The justices sided with Marlean Ames, a woman who worked for the state for years. She accused her boss of passing her over for a promotion in favor of a lesbian candidate. Then she was demoted and her job filled by a homosexual male.

REICHARD: Ames sued the state under Title VII, claiming discrimination based on sexual orientation—what some media reports have called reverse discrimination. At oral argument back in February, Justice Sotomayor described the problem:

SOTOMAYOR: She was a member of the majority group, she was a 20-year employee, great reviews, and then all of a sudden she's not hired, and someone's hired who's gay, doesn't have her level of college experience, and didn't even want the job. Something's suspicious about that. It certainly can give rise to an inference of discrimination.

Ohio Solicitor General Elliott Geiser represented the Ohio Department of Youth Services before the high court. WORLD’s Harrison Watters called him up after the decision was handed down. Geiser said the state never violated Title VII:

GEISER: She’s still at the department. As far as I'm concerned, Ohio never discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation or sex, and that's what she's claiming, and we dispute that, and we're going to continue to fight to vindicate Ohio's process in this matter.

EICHER: The Supreme Court didn’t decide whether Ames was discriminated against. It remanded the case to lower court, where that question will get sorted out. What the justices did decide is this: Ames no longer has to meet a higher burden just because she’s part of a majority group. Title VII protects all equally.

You heard Mary refer to media outlets describing the ruling as a case of reverse discrimination. But Geiser says that’s not accurate.

GEISER: The Supreme Court did not use that term in this case, and to my understanding, has not used that term. Some lower courts have. And as I said at oral argument, and as Ohio has pressed all along, the law treats everybody equally. Uh, discrimination is wrong no matter who it is against…We’ve always maintained that Ohio acted properly in this case. And we’ll continue to press our claims and defenses below.

REICHARD: So the case proceeds in lower court without that higher burden of proof on Ames the employee.

EICHER: Alright, before we go, quick treatment of the next two opinions.

In CC/Devas v Antrix, the Indian government canceled a satellite contract with an Indian media startup. The startup won a big arbitration award and turned to U.S. courts to collect. All nine justices sided with the startup in its collection efforts, and so the case now goes back to a lower court for more proceedings.

REICHARD: And finally: Blom Bank Sal v Honickman. Victims of Hamas attacks sued a Lebanese Bank, claiming it helped terrorists by providing financial services to its clients. Lower courts dismissed the case. So the plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to reopen it, based on newer legal arguments.

But the Supreme Court said no—changing your legal theory after the fact isn’t enough to bring back a case that’s already been closed.

And that closes our cases on this week’s Legal Docket!

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