Legal Docket: Wednesday edition

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 28th of June, 2023.

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

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Well, it was another false alarm day at the U.S. Supreme Court. So many of us here were looking for a couple of First Amendment and religious free-exercise cases. Of course, we’re curious, too, how the court will rule on affirmative action and student loans. But we’ll have to wait at least until tomorrow. Instead, the court gave us three others that we’ll tell you about in just a minute.

So before we get started on that today, I want to tell you we’re now into the last 72 hours of our June Giving Drive.

So many have given already. And if that describes you, I think you’ll enjoy hearing from WORLD’s Washington bureau headquarters which happens to be situated across the street from the U.S. Capitol, and our next-door neighbor is the U.S. Supreme Court where helping keep an eye on things is one of our Washington reporters, Carolina Lumetta.

CAROLINA LUMETTA: I’ll be here pretty much every morning this week, waiting for the justices to hand down the final, major decisions of the season. And it’s because of your support that I get to be right in the middle of the action. It’s a pretty busy time, but not too busy to say “thank you” for your support and thank you for all of the ways you help WORLD grow and expand Biblically objective journalism even here in the nation’s capital.

EICHER: So great that she’s there. We’re just sitting here, like everyone else, hitting refresh on the Supreme Court website. So, you do what you can and you rely on your colleagues!

But if you’ve not given to our June Giving Drive, I do hope you will. Just visit wng.org/donate.

Well, let’s jump into the details of the cases we have. As you say, Mary, not the ones we’re monitoring especially closely, but important nonetheless.

REICHARD: That’s right, because legal principles matter to all of us. So let’s do jump in.

In Counterman v Colorado, the court ruled 7-2 in favor of a convicted stalker. The question was what standard of proof is required to convict a stalker.

Billy Counterman sent a female singer thousands of unwanted messages she found threatening. He’s serving a four-year sentence for stalking.

EICHER: Counterman appealed that conviction. He argued Colorado ought to consider his subjective intent. He says he has a mental illness and never intended to harm anyone.

But Colorado law only considers what a reasonable person would believe about his unwanted comments. What the law calls the objective standard of analysis.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion. You can hear the eventual ruling in this comment she made during oral argument in April:

JUSTICE KAGAN: How could you not be able to prove this case with a recklessness standard?

REICHARD: And that’s the new rule. Counterman’s stalking conviction is overturned and he gets a new trial with this new standard. He could still be found guilty of stalking, though, under the new reckless standard. (And we can expect more disputes over what that means.)

The second opinion in Mallory v Norfolk Southern will force companies to litigate in state courts—even if the underlying injury isn’t connected to the state in which the suit is brought.

Norfolk Southern Railway is based in Virginia. A man who worked for the railway and lives in Virginia sued his former employer for negligence in Pennsylvania. The railway countered it never consented to be sued there. It only registered in Pennsylvania because state law required it.

Lower courts agreed with the railway and dismissed the suit. But the man appealed to the Supreme Court.

EICHER: By a vote that got reported as a 5-4 decision though in reality it’s more of a 4-1-4 decision, the lower court must look again at the employee’s lawsuit. Justice Alito is the “one,” and he created that majority five to vacate the lower court’s decision to dismiss. But this is key: Alito says the railway could still prevail on another theory. So we’ve not heard the last of this, either.

REICHARD: Final opinion today is in Moore v Harper, this one 6-3. It rejects broad power by state legislatures over federal election rules.

Republicans in control of the North Carolina State House drew what state courts called a gerrymandered congressional map.

The question is whether state legislatures have sole authority to regulate federal elections— without constraint by courts.

EICHER: Answer: No. The majority rejected the “independent state legislature” theory that gives state legislatures alone the power to govern federal elections. Federal courts have oversight power when district boundary disputes arise.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Alito dissented. They say the case should have been dismissed as moot because of later developments in the case.

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