I agree with your entire post except this sentence. The standing “problem” is not a problem at the state level. Texas can give standing to a dog to sue in its own courts if it wants. General standing in a state court is not a constitutional issue, and nobody suggests it is. What people are complaining about is the rather crafty legal maneuvering that makes a pre-enactment challenge impossible.
The reason that pro-life groups complain about these particular suits are for the reasons you previously suggested. They are shams. The plaintiffs do not care if the doctors perform abortions. There is no adversity between the parties which is basic in any court system. In these early cases both the plaintiffs and the defendants want the law struck down. That is a sham court case.
These certainly aren’t the first sham lawsuits. There are at least two cases when an aunt sued a nephew for greeting her two energetically. It was done to get a third party (in those cases insurance companies) to do something. That’s what this is an attempt to get a third party, the court, to make a ruling that they can’t make until some case is brought.
That’s not a sham lawsuit. The aunt really wants the nephew to pay her money for her injuries. The fact that the nephew is covered by insurance likely spurred the suit, indeed, she likely wouldn’t sue at all if it was coming out of nephew’s pocket, but she is still adverse to the nephew and the insurance company lawyers will mount a vigorous defense. The case will be decided/settled on the merits.
She sued because the insurance company wouldn’t settle – probably because they thought she wouldn’t sue to force them. She didn’t want money from her nephew. She sued to force the insurance company to pay or settle. These suits are also to force a third party – the courts – to act.
I’m not sure what you are saying. Yes, the nephew purchased liability insurance from a third party and the aunt likely knew that by suing the nephew it would induce the third party to act.
That indisputable fact does not mean you can sue a third party, nor force a third party to become involved, nor does it follow that the court itself is such a third party that can be induced to act. The court is an arbiter that settles disputes between the parties in front of it. If there is no dispute, then there is no need for a court.
So, you’re saying that ordinarily, there’s both a standing requirement, and a “has a beef” requirement, and that this law removes the standing requirement, but leaves the requirement of habes bos intact? Where can one find out more about this habes bos principle? In what law is it laid out?
You want me to provide a legal citation to you that courts exist for the purpose of resolving disputes between parties? Just seeing if you are really asking that question.
Also this law does not “remove” the standing requirement. It grants standing to any person except TX officials. TX officials do not have standing to bring such a suit. There remains a requirement to have standing in TX courts.
With respect to this law, yes, I am asking for that. Because so far as I can tell, the purpose of this law is to enable lawsuits from people who do not have disputes (also known as not having standing) with the defendants.
False. I can have a dispute with someone yet not have standing. I can have standing yet not a dispute. They are not synonyms.
People keep getting confused with this word standing and conflate the federal case law regarding standing in federal courts with the law of standing in state courts. They are different.
Assuming you are not a TX state employee, you have standing to bring a lawsuit against an abortion doctor in TX who performs a post heartbeat abortion. Full stop. There is no debate about that.
But if you file suit against a TX abortion doctor and the judge asks you what you want and your reply is that you feel it is a constitutional right for the doctor to keep performing abortions and the doctor feels the same way, then there is nothing left for the judge to do. You both agree. The judge serves no function in that situation. You aren’t harming the doctor in any way; you aren’t asking the doctor to do or not do anything. You want a cite for something that goes back to the dawn of civilization and the entire purpose of courts. When there is no disagreement, you don’t need a court.
What you seem to be asking is that you as plaintiff and the doctor as defendant to be able to jointly go to the judge and ask that he forbid others from suing under the law and to strike down the whole law as unconstitutional. That’s not how things work. See the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry. That doesn’t mean you don’t have standing. You have standing but no case that needs adjudicated.
Now, take a person who is opposed to legal abortion and wants the judge to issue damages and an injunction against performing future abortions. The doctor says oh hell no, it is my patients’ constitutional right to have my services. There are now adversarial positions between which a judge must adjudicate. That’s what courts are for. In the federal system, that still wouldn’t be enough. The federal courts would say that the pro-life person does not have a particularized injury by the doctor performing abortions, therefore no federal standing. There is a dispute there, but you don’t have standing to bring it.
And what if the judge asks what I want, and I reply that I want ten thousand dollars. That’s the honest truth: I do want money. As, I expect, do most folks, on all sides of the abortion debate.
Do you also want a court order that prevents the doctor from performing more abortions? If so, then you are good. As long as you are asking for what the law provides, then you can file the suit.
You keep saying “the state can enable standing for anyone” yet the example cited up-thread is to give, for example, taxpayers to a municipality standing to sue over what their tax dollars go to. While a person in that case has a very slim interest that can be defined as a “beef”, they have an actual one. For example, the suggestion “$3 of your property tax is going to a new library you disagree with” would normally be considered insufficiently significant to sue (unless, I assume a class action for a few thousand taxpayers) and you say that Texas passed a law saying they can still have standing. (Which reminds me of the story about George Bernard Shaw asking the society lady “Would you sleep with me for a million pounds? Yes? How about for one pound?” Texas granting standing to a municipal taxpayer is similarly just haggling about the price) This anti-abortion law allows someone with absolutely no connection to Texas, or the abortion, or the people involved to file suit. To me, that’s a whole new and different situation.
I’m not so sure it’s a bogus suit, though. What I read was that at least one suit was filed by someone out of state who is a disbarred lawyer. This suggests to me that a lawyer of a certain ethical bent (cue the lawyer jokes) is seeing the opportunity for a goodly cash payout for nothing. And being a (ex)lawyer with free time, I presume, he would know the ins and outs of filing papers etc. for suing someone without having to put cash out of pocket for anything except filing fees, and a possible $10,000 payday. Apparently, according to this law, the plaintiff’s personal views on abortion are irrelevant.
Basically, the doctor announced “I dare any random individual to sue me” and some completely random individual did just that. I have yet to read if there’s any connection between the two of them.
Legal scholars predict that state lawmakers will start including citizen lawsuit provisions in other types of laws with the same goals: evading established judicial review and sowing discord in already deeply divided communities.
Two states already have used a similar legal tactic in laws that aim to prevent transgender youth from using facilities or playing on the sports teams that correspond to their gender identity.
A Tennessee law enacted this year allows students, parents or teachers to sue a public school and collect damages for alleged psychological, emotional or physical harm if the school allows students to use the same bathroom, sleeping quarters or changing facility as people of the opposite sex. The law seeks to prevent transgender students from using facilities that correspond to their gender identity.
But again, this law simply affirms the standing of people with skin in the game - other students, their parents, etc. - rather than any of 7 billion people around the globe. The closer example is:
In 1973, the Endangered Species Act ushered in a raft of lawsuits from private citizens who were empowered to sue individuals and businesses on behalf of nature for violating environmental rules.
It might be reasonable to argue that wrecking the environment hurts everyone in the country. But it’s harder to make the same case about abortion and its impact.
Plus, it opens the floodgates to laws allowing possible lawsuits on the right or the left for pet causes:
People could be encouraged to start reporting immigrants living in the country illegally, violations of restrictive voting laws or the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 schools, among other possibilities, Michaels said. Complaints against schools, workplaces or businesses that require masks or proof of vaccines in states with laws banning mask and vaccine mandates also could crop up, he said.
I wondering by what special process a texas court will determine the anti-abortion credentials of a plaintiff. People do genuine change their mind - more than once even - on this issue.
Would a specifc requirement eg “must have donated 500$ to an anti-abortion campaign in the last 6 months” be legal?
What if a liberal state enacts a similar letter-of-marque type law for a liberal cause? With them aim of getting the whole concept squished.
Several federal environmental statutes had provisions for “citizen suits” to enforce them. The expansive nature of these statutes ran into all sort of Article III standing issues and a lot of the Article III standing jurisprudence comes from the environmental context.
One proposed “solution”, by some pro-environmental suit scholars, was that the cases should be brought in state court, which did not have the same Article III standing obligations and had a much more permissible regime. (This raised some interesting questions about the treatment of federal claims in state court and many statute-specific venue issues).
I guess the question would then be - what difference does a person’s view on a topic make to the validity of a court case? Why can’t a supposedly allegedly unethical lawyer try for an automatic payday no matter what his or her beliefs, if the law permits such a suit? Can standing be determined by mindset, or simply on the facts as they relate to the act in question?
All this ignores the central issue - which is that the law classifies an abortion at 6 weeks as a crime in clear violation of Roe v Wade. This is the basis of all lawsuits under this law, that an illegal act was committed Presumably the hope is that (a) this would scare off abortion providers so the law would never be challenged and hopefully for the authors (b) should a case reach the Supreme Court they would reverse Roe v Wade to validate the law.
Otherwise, the basic flaw - the act is not a crime - would mean the whole law is invalid, the lawsuit(s) invalid, and if so, presumably the provision to insulate the plaintiffs from court costs and lawyer fees is also invalid.
The whole point of the law is that the state NOT enforce the law, since the courts cannot rule a law out of existence, they can only prevent the state from enforcing it.
So what would the state do to enforce an injunction against performing abortions? Presumably as soon as they do anything, there are grounds to have the state enjoined from doing so.
Which then brings up the question, can the state enforce the awards for $10,000 and lawyer fees, or does any attempt to collect using the power of the state then trigger the ability to seek an injunction against the state?
There is no anti-abortion requirement. The only requirement is that you must be genuinely seeking what the law provides for: an injunction and money damages.
I think almost certainly it falls on the state and would then be justiciable. But they don’t have to go that far. The defendant can raise the constitutional issue in the state court before the damage award. I don’t think the lawmakers ever believed that this law would ultimately be upheld. They crafted it in such a way to prevent pre-enactment enforcement and cause some liberal tears along the way.