Court limits Hobbs Act, Sherman Act
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Tuesday that the federal Hobbs Act does not outlaw acts or threats of violence, thus undercutting a verdict and a nationwide injunction that abortion clinics had won against anti-abortion demonstrators.
Putting an end to a marathon, 19-year dispute, the Court ordered a federal appeals court to enter a ruling in favor of the demonstrators and their organizations. The ruling came in the cases of Scheidler v. National Organization for Women (04-1244) and Operation Rescue v. National Organization for Women (04–1352).
Abortion clinics had relied upon the Hobbs Act in asserting claims of violence and threats of violence intended to shut down the clinics’ operations — acts that the clinics contended provided a basis for their claim of violations of the RICO law against racketeering organizations. In Tuesday’s ruling, the Court rejected the only remaining premise of the clinics’ claim, declaring that “physical violence unrelated to robbery or extortion falls outside the Hobbs Act’s scope.”
In the second of two rulings on argued cases, the Court, again unanimous, decided that it is not an automatic (”per se”) violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act for competing companies that have integrated their operations in a joint venture to set the prices at which the venture’s products are sold. The decision came in the cases of Texaco v. Dagher (04-805) and Shell Oil v. Dagher (04-814). (See below for further details of this ruling.)
New Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., did not take part in either ruling; the cases were argued before he joined the Court.
The Scheidler-Operation Rescue case had been to the Court twice before. In 1994, the Court, in a decision favoring the abortion providers, ruled that the clinics could sue under RICO without offering proof that the clinic blockades were done for economic reasons. But, in 2003, the Court ruled by an 8-1 vote that the Hobbs Act applied only to extortion that involved the actual taking of property, not when violence or threats violated the rights of patients or doctors. That had seemed, at the time, to end the case that had begun with the filing of the case in 1986.
In Tuesday’s decision, written by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the Court declared that the Hobbs Act requires a link between violence or threats and robbery or extortion. There is no free-standing crime under the Act of violence or threats that affect interstate commerce, the Court ruled. Tracing the history of the Act back to its original passage in 1934, the Court said that Congress had never broken the required link between violence and robbery or extortion. If the clinics’ expansive view of the criminalization of violence or threats alone were adopted, the opinion said, “it would federalize much ordinary criminal behavior, ranging from simple assault to murder, behavior that typically is the subject of state, not federal, prosecution.”
The ruling was based strictly on statutory interpretation, and was written without conveying any of the emotions that have always surrounded this dispute over attempts to shut down clinics across the nation. Breyer’s spare 11-page opinion was an almost anti-climactic conclusion to the searing dispute.
The Court’s ruling in the Texaco/Shell case similarly was a brisk, six-page opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas. The decision expressly left unresolved a major antitrust issue that lurked in the background of the case: whether the Sherman Act’s bans on restraints of trade does not apply at all to joint ventures.
Instead, the ruling was confined to the sole issue on which review was granted: whether price-setting by a joint venture on its products would always violate the Act’s Section 1. The case involved an antitrust lawsuit by operators of 23,000 service stations selling under the Texas or Shell brands of gasoline. It challenged the western states joint venture of the two giant oil companies for marketing gasoline, with the product still sold under both the Texaco and Shell brands but at the same price. The lawsuit did not claim a violation of Sherman Section 1 based on a rule-of-reason analysis.
Is this an unusual number of unanimous opinions?
Maybe it’s just because the big opinions like O Centro and Ayotte were unanimous that it seems this way, but is the Court entering some sort of collegiality period where they are reaching a consensus on previously hotly contested issues?
Does the CJ deserve any credit for this?
Comment by wt — February 28, 2006 @ 10:18 am
The new chief justice probably had little to do with the unanimity in this particular case, even though he is said to have fostered collegiality in other cases.
The last time this case was before the Supreme Court, it ruled 8-to-1 in favor of the abortion protesters. That was nearly as lopsided a margin as this time.
The fact that the court was unanimous proves only that the Seventh Circuit ignored the plain import of the Supreme Court’s prior ruling, not that the justices themselves have suddenly become consensus-oriented.
Federal laws such as the Hobbs Act were not designed to create a duplicative remedy for all conduct that may violate state tort law. That’s the lesson of this decision — and of past decisions that the Seventh Circuit chose to ignore.
Comment by Hans Bader — February 28, 2006 @ 11:52 am
I commented to someone the other day that the Roberts Court is starting to look like the John Marshall Court with all of the unanimous opinions. In addition to Ayotte, O Centro, and Scheidler, there were Goodman (decided very narrowly), Wisconsin Right to Life (decided very narrowly), Guzek (essentially unanimous with a concurrence, also decided on relatively narrow grounds), Domino’s Pizza (which I wouldn’t necessarily have expected to be unanimous), and Arbaugh (which, regrettably, given that we filed an amicus brief on the losing side, I did fear would be unanimous).
Comment by Kevin Newsom — February 28, 2006 @ 12:52 pm
I think that in this case, the numbers may back up WT’s gut feeling; certainly the term feels very collegial reading the opinions thusfar, so I went to the raw numbers for the last few terms, and list the results here.
Long story short: So far this term, the Court has handed down 37 opinions, 10 of which have generated dissents, i.e. 27%; but by this time last term, the Court had handed down 23 opinions, 12 of which - more than half - generated dissents, i.e. 52%; the term before that, 26 opinions, 10 of which generated dissents, i.e. 38%.
Now, that’s a very small sampling, and so my conclusion could be flawed for several reasons, but it does seem to me that WT is right, to some extent: the Roberts Court’s first semester has been relatively collegial by recent standards.
Comment by Simon — February 28, 2006 @ 4:07 pm
Simon makes an excellent (and empirically backed point). I’ll offer a slightly more cynical one. Last year, folks around the Court commented on what a weird year it was (due to the Chief’s illness and absence) and on the lack of “blockbuster” cases on the docket. The Ten Commandments decisions came out as a “split double-header” (to use Justice Scalia’s phrase), and if I recall, the Grokster argument was the case where it was toughest to get a seat at oral arguments. A few outliers notwithstanding, the term was high on technical habeas matters and low on drama.
This term has brought much of the same. The Court, whether due to the change in membership or not, has taken and decided some very dry cases that also aren’t that “hard” (I use that term with extreme caution). As I said in a similar post over at Volokh, today’s cases are a good example of the trend toward short, unanimous opinions resolving relatively straightforward legal issues.
Contrary to what some have said, O Centro is not necessarily an exception, especially in light of the Court’s opinion last term in Cutter v. Wilkinson. Ayotte and the Eleventh Amendment prison case are slightly more surprising, but then again, so were some of the cases last term (think Arthur Andersen, where the Court unanimously overturned the firm’s conviction).
Comment by LegalThoughts — February 28, 2006 @ 4:36 pm
Surely it’s statuory. Breyer could find some economic/int’l commerce reason for anything if he had to.
Comment by Joe — February 28, 2006 @ 7:10 pm
I went back another two terms, and it turns out that the dissent rate by this point in OT’02 was 36%, and in OT’01, it was 50%. So I think that it is fair to say, at very least, that this is the most collegial start of the term in at least five years.
Comment by Simon — March 1, 2006 @ 9:10 am
It’s still too early to tell. Surely CJ Roberts has had an impact on the court, but now that the musical chairs that accompanies a transition has concluded, the court will settle down with its own work.
There are some tough cases coming up, among them Hamdan, Perry (Texas redistricting), Carhart (partial birth abortion), public employee speech, and the various lethal injection petitions. I would be very surprised if any of the rulings ended up with a six-judge majority.
In any event, I applaud the Chief Justice’s efforts to bring collegiality to the bench.
Comment by 14th Amendment — March 1, 2006 @ 10:46 am
Simon:
I appreciate your putting those statistics together. They’re interesting and likewise support the feeling I had that there has been more agreement among the Justices this term.
I wonder how those statistics might change if we were to consider the number of dissenting votes as a percentage of total votes issued by the Justices. In answering the original question about unanimous decisions, your analysis treats an 8-1 decision the same as a 5-4 decision. Certainly an 8-1 decision would indicate greater consensus than a 5-4 one.
I may take this one up if no one else does first when I get some free time on my hands.
Comment by iuris causa — March 1, 2006 @ 3:36 pm
iuris causa-
Interesting point. I kept notes of who voted for what in the blog post I linked to ante, so I can add them up easily enough. If we count each Justice once in each case (that is, they get counted one for losing, not one for each dissent they joined), the numbers work out:
OT’05: 18
OT’04: 24 (excludes Booker)
OT’03: 24 (excludes McConnell)
OT’02: 14
OT’01: 38
So in fact, seen this way, it could be argued at OT’02 was the most collegial in the last five years. I don’t know which metric (if either) is a more appropriate measure.
Comment by Simon — March 2, 2006 @ 8:57 am
I think there are some unusual circumstances, and I would hesitate to conclude that there is a new era of collegiality, or that Chief Justice Roberts is responsible for it. Justices Stevens and Scalia haven’t suddenly forgotten all of the things they’ve been disagreeing about for all these years.
As others have observed, there was clearly an attempt to get a number of difficult cases out of the way before Justice O’Connor retired. Just before she left, we saw several unusual unanimous opinions — decided narrowly, and leaving the core issues to be litigated another day.
Chief Justice Roberts is a very smart and talanted man, but he is not going to totally transform the place in a matter of months. Change at the Supreme Court arrives at a notoriously glacial pace. The well known disagreements among the remaining seven Members of the Rehnquist Court haven’t suddenly been papered over.
Comment by Marc Shepherd — March 2, 2006 @ 11:51 am