6-3 to dismiss the case as moot. Kavanaugh concurs but says it is time to hear a Second Amendment case. Alito, joined by Gorsuch and Thomas calls bullshit.
A couple of thoughts: I don’t think the case was moot. I think it is bad jurisprudence to allow New York to do what it did here, and if I tried half of that, a judge would be up my ass. Close to a Rule 10 violation. The Plaintiffs had many things left to argue.
I liked Alito’s Heller analysis (joined by Kavanaugh) and it seems that there are a strong 4 at least to do some serious gutting of gun laws, which I fully support. Roberts, as always, is an unknown.
I am sort of confused by Alito’s strict scrutiny analysis of New York’s “compelling interest” in knowing if a person who is carrying an unloaded and cased gun is reeeeeally coming back from a shooting range. When 40 plus states would allow that same person to carry a concealed and loaded gun pretty much anywhere in public, is the interest that compelling?
Alito analyzed it as not being suited for the purpose (for example, he said the officer could just call the shooting range) but isn’t there more to strict scrutiny than that?
No, if the attorneys are sanctioned, that comes out of their pockets.
But I misstated. The clients should be sanctioned in this case. NY argued in the District Court and in the Court of Appeals that this law was essential, essential I tells ya, to keep the people of NY safe.
Then when cert was granted, they decided it wasn’t necessary at all. Passed a law repealing the NYC regulation and then immediately went to the Supreme Court and said that we’re all good, nothing to see here, please dismiss.
Meanwhile the Plaintiffs spent God-only-knows how much money fighting this and the state can enforce their “new” law as harshly as they want; no Constitutional relief, no money damages, or no attorneys fees for the Plaintiffs.
New York had a law which restricted the transportation of firearms. Some people argued that his was a Second Amendment violation (and in my personal opinion, they were right) and wanted an injunction against the law being enforced. And while the case was working its way up through the court system, New York amended the law and removed the transportation restrictions.
To me, this seems like a textbook example of a moot case. There is no need for any court to issue against the enforcement of a law which no longer exists. The Supreme Court can’t order New York to do anything that it hasn’t already voluntarily done.
It is not moot because NYS passed a law that said that the plaintiffs must take their firearms directly to and from these out of city ranges. Had the plaintiffs won in court, they would have proposed a more broad injunction. If I am going for a week to visit my mother, for example, who lives in a town 4 hours away where there is a gun range, why can’t I take my gun with me, unloaded and cased? New York robbed the plaintiffs of arguing an injunction which would allow that.
The plaintiffs also could have been awarded money damages and most importantly attorneys fees as it was a constitutional claim.
This ruling allows a government who is violating your constitutional rights to litigate until the very end, running up your attorney bills, and then right before you beat them, they change the law giving you the very minimum that you asked for and then mooting the case and putting you on the hook for fees. It prevents all but the very rich from access to redressing their constitutional injuries.
It awards them for dishonest litigating. Through three rounds of briefing, NYC insisted that this law was absolutely essential to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the people of New York. So compelling, it argued, that it survived strict scrutiny. Yet it just so happened to amend the law after cert was granted?!?
My understanding is the plaintiffs didn’t ask for any of these things. They were given everything they asked for.
The high cost of legal fees is a strange argument to make in favor of continuing a legal case.
You’re saying the government litigated this case until the very end. That’s not what happened; the government resolved the case in favor of the plaintiffs. You and Samuel Alito are the ones saying the case should have been dragged out longer. Taking this case to the Supreme Court would have resulted in substantially higher legal expenses - and gotten nothing more than what they already have.
The Plaintiffs asked for the “other and further relief as is just and proper” which I was taught in law school preserves your claim for any type of relief, which I’ll go back and look at after this case.
Further, the scope of the injunction is what is important. Yes, they are allowed to take a “direct” route to the range and back. What does that mean? They asked generally for an injunction which a court should look at more broadly.
If I keep chopping down a tree that you keep planting on public lands and you ask for an injunction and win, you can propose your own language for the injunction which wouldn’t let me lawyer my way out of it. This case is akin to me taking you through three levels of appellate process and then promising not to chop down the tree but reserving the right to pour chemicals on it, and then the court says that your case is moot because you got everything you asked for and did not mention word one about chemicals in your complaint.
It would be silly for the plaintiffs to argue every detail they wanted in carrying guns to the range when they had not yet established their right to carry the guns in the first place. The specific relief follows once the general relief is granted.
What extra legal fees and dragging out longer? Briefs were done and the argument was submitted. All the Court had to do was rule in the plaintiffs’ favor. But the important part is that the plaintiffs would have had their own legal fees paid with a victory.
That’s probably at least a $500,000 win for NYC at it is unfair and against the spirit of the law to allow a party to make a tactical decision that they might lose after three rounds of litigation to attempt to moot the case.
I feel that you’re far too certain about the outcome of this case. These are the nine justices that collectively voted 6-3 that the case was moot. If, for some reason, these nine justices had been prohibited from declaring the case moot, why assume that there would have been a majority in favor of the outcome you’re describing?
The court might not have issued the expanded rights you imagined or awarded the plaintiffs their legal fees. The plaintiffs were appealing to the Supreme Court because they had lost at the two previous courts. If the case had been decided by the Supreme Court, it might have been another defeat.
First, in 1983 Constitutional claims, a winning plaintiff is entitled by law to attorneys fees. It is not discretionary by the judge.
And sure, anything can happen at the Supreme Court, but every commentator on this case was predicting a defeat for NYC. Even NYS predicted a defeat: that’s why they changed the law. Many anti-gun people were pissed at NYS for enacting such a senseless gun law that would nearly guarantee the Supreme Court reversing it.
As I noted above, I would have predicted a defeat. But the question is how big a defeat it would have been.
Alito seems to feel that there should have been a broad decision that exceeds what New York did voluntarily. It appears you agree.
But if a majority of the court had agreed with that assessment and felt that New York hadn’t gone far enough, they had the means of acting. They could have issued a broad decision that went beyond what New York had done.
The fact that the majority decided this was a moot case suggests this was not the situation. It suggests that the majority was not going to order New York to do anything more than it had done.