The Court ruled 8-0 (Alito did not vote) that RICO cannot be used against abortion clinic protest groups:
The Court gets it resoundingly right. RICO was never intended to apply to groups like abortion protestors, the Seventh Circuit’s whacko opinion notwithstanding. While I expect womens’ rights groups to be upset with this decision, they have no good reason to be: using RICO in this manner was justing twisting the law into a pretzel in furtherence of their own ends. Regulation of violence and threats outside abortion clinics should not be a federal issue anyway; every state has laws to punish such offenders. But even if there is federal jurisdiction over such crimes, RICO was not the law to define it.
I agree. And I think it’s a no-brainer. I don’t care if the Chief Justice is John Roberts, Ted Olson, Bruce Babbitt, or Neal Katyal, this is an obvious and correct result.
What does this have to do with the “Roberts Court”? It was a unanimous decision, so it’s unlikely that the Rehnquist court or the Burger Court or the Warren court would have decided things any differently. When you get Thomas agreeing with Ginsburg and Stevens, is there much ideological ground left uncovered?
Frank Easterbrook, Edith Jones, and Richard Epstein, to name three, are more conservative than Thomas is – or at least conservative in significantly different ways. Any of the critical legal scholars out there – like my old torts professor – are substantially more liberal, jurisprudentially, than Ginsburg or Stevens. And people like Richard Posner and Cass Sunstein are ideologically orthogonal to both the left and the right. There’re a ton of different schools of jurisprudence that aren’t represented in the spectrum currently on the Court.
No, no - nothing to do with Roberts, specifically. Just that this Court, in 2006, is the “Roberts Court.” I’m not so sure the Warren Court would have done things differently, though.
I know nothing about Chief Justice Wood other than her decision in this case. I do believe, though, that circuit courts are more prone to, shall we say, “creative” rulings than the Supreme Court is – commensurately, I’d hazard that if Chief Justice Wood were on the Supreme Court rather than the Seventh Circuit, she might well have decided differently.
Given that Congress addressed this particular situation with the 1994 law, ISTM that (from a nonlawyerly perspective, at least) Congressional intent is best reflected in the actual words of this statute, rather than what might be read into the intent of the Hobbs Act.
Bet this one doesn’t turn out to be much of a debate; it’s hard for me to imagine a good argument on the other side here. It’s one thing to want the law to be different than it is, but it’s another to argue that it actually is different than the Supremes have ruled it to be.
I wonder about the headline of the article Bricker linked to:
“Justices rule against abortion clinics”
I feel this is misleading. I don’t think they in fact did so, especially considering the presence of federal legislation dealing directly with clinic protests. What they did was rule on a point of law.
I won’t go so far as to say there is bias here, but it is on its face a misleading headline, and the editors ought to have done a better job.
Personally, I think all RICO laws should be thrown out under the doctrine, “it seemed like a good idea at the time but what were we thinking?” The abuse these laws have led to are shocking.
But I’d have been happier if RICO had been overruled in some case involving a comic book store or a backyard marijuana plant rather than this particular one. It raises the question of whether the Roberts court really is concerned about the limits of RICO or is unhappy about the limits of pro-life protesters.
Meh, “Justices rule on Point of Law” isn’t really an informative headline. The organization that lost the suit was NOW, but a lot of people wouldn’t know who that is, and “Justices rule against Women” or "womens organization"would be a biased headline. So I think the actual headline is the fairly decent. And they do specify who the actual looser of the appeal was in the article itself.
