FedSoc Forums

On Tuesday, March 3, 2015 the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in City of Los Angeles v. Patel. Los Angeles has an ordinance that requires hotels to maintain certain records about their guests and to produce those records for police officers upon request. The officer does not necessarily need a warrant or any particular suspicion. Hoteliers claim that this regime violates the Fourth Amendment. Interestingly, the hoteliers do not allege that any particular search was illegal. Is this kind of “facial” Fourth Amendment challenge to a statute or ordinance (as opposed to an “as applied” challenge to a particular search carried out under the statute) permissible? This issue raises fundamental questions about the constitutional structure of judicial review, with importance reaching far beyond the Fourth Amendment context. -- Featuring: Prof. Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, Georgetown University Law Center.

On Wednesday, March 4, 2015 the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in King v. Burwell, one of the most talked-about cases of the October 2014 term. At issue is whether the Internal Revenue Service may permissibly promulgate regulations to extend tax-credit subsidies to coverage purchased through exchanges established by the federal government under Section 1321 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Those challenging the statute argue that tax-credit subsidies can only be legally extended to those purchasing insurance in state-run exchanges – fewer than 20 states have created such exchanges. Professor Jonathan Adler, widely regarded as one of the architects of this most recent challenge to the affordable care act, attended the oral arguments and offered his thoughts to a live Teleforum audience. -- Featuring: Prof. Jonathan H. Adler, Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University School of Law

Miriam Ibrahim is a Sudanese woman who was arrested in Sudan and charged with adultery in August 2013 on the grounds that her marriage to a Christian man from South Sudan was void under Sudan's version of Islamic law, which says Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslims. The court added the charge of apostasy in February 2014, and she was sentenced to hang after refusing to renounce Christianity. Though her father was Muslim, he left her Ethiopian Orthodox mother to raise her from early childhood, and she was raised a Christian. Though she eventually was released in July 2014 and is now living in the United States, her arrest raises the question of whether and how the United States should respond to instances of the denial of religious freedom in other countries. -- Featuring: Prof. Thomas F. Farr, Senior Fellow and Director, Religious Freedom Project, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, Georgetown University and Tina Ramírez, Founder and Executive Director, Hardwired, Inc.

Since the 1980s, the Department of Justice has utilized civil asset forfeiture as an effective tool to seize and forfeit billions of dollars-worth of assets allegedly connected to criminal activity as either an instrumentality or fruit of the crime. Since the inception of the asset forfeiture program, the Justice Department has shared much of these funds with state and local law enforcement authorities under its equitable sharing program, and many states have their own civil forfeiture laws and procedures. Critics of the program believe that civil asset forfeiture is fundamentally unfair, claiming, among other things, that it has the potential to warp law enforcement priorities, that the existing procedures are stacked against innocent property owners, and that it is simply wrong to seize someone’s property when that person has not been charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. Several proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform the civil asset forfeiture program, the Justice Department has announced that it is conducting an internal review of this program, and a number of states have recently undertaken a review of their own civil asset forfeiture laws. -- Featuring: John G. Malcolm, Director and Ed Gilbertson and Sherry Lindberg Gilbertson Senior Legal Fellow, Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, The Heritage Foundation and John W. Vardaman, III, Assistant Deputy Chief for Policy, Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section, United States Department of Justice

Lars Hedegaard was prosecuted under the European “incitement to hate” law all the way up to the Danish Supreme Court. Upon a full court re-hearing he was unanimously acquitted of intending his comments for public dissemination. He then survived a terrorist assassination attempt. Mr. Hedegaard will discuss why he has devoted so much to the cause of free speech and his deep belief that robust speech is vital to the survival of Western civilization. He assessed the long-term prospects for reform of speech laws in Europe, post Charlie Hebdo, and commented on what the United States might learn from developments in Europe. -- Featuring: Lars Hedegaard, Founder, International Free Press Society. Interviewer: Karen J. Lugo, Member, Federalism & Separation of Powers Practice Group Executive Committee.

In his recent book, Saving Congress from Itself: Emancipating the States and Empowering Their People, former Senator James Buckley eloquently contends that our federal system of government has been systematically undermined by the practice of Congress intruding on matters the Constitution reserves to the States. While Senator Buckley recognizes the inevitability of competition between state and federal politicians to be seen as solving important problems for constituents, he contends that without the federal judiciary keeping federal lawmakers within constitutional bounds, they face strong, likely irresistible, incentives to use federal taxpayer dollars to benefit home states and districts. Senator Buckley laments above all the Supreme Court’s 1937 Spending Clause decision in Steward Machine Company v. Davis. The whole problem with Steward Machine Company, according to Senator Buckley, is its holding that “in its pursuit of the general welfare, Congress is authorized to provide states with funds to implement programs that Congress itself has no power to write into law.” -- As the culmination of his analysis, Senator Buckley offers a “modest” proposal: that “Congress immediately terminate all federal programs that offer grants to states and their subdivisions.” Acknowledging that federal grants currently constitute more than 30% of state revenues, and hence Congress cannot cut off the flood of federal money overnight, Senator Buckley specifically proposes that Congress “terminate the grants by converting them into single no-strings-attached block grants --- one for each state” and then subsequently phase out these block grants over a period of years. -- Featuring: Hon. James L. Buckley, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (ret.) and former U.S. Senator. Interviewer: Robert R. Gasaway, Partner, Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

In December 2013, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) released a proposal on the “Single Point of Entry” (SPOE) strategy as a means of resolving large failing banks without financial-market disruption. Paul Kupiec and Peter Wallison wrote a paper strongly critiquing the strategy, and presented it to Federalist Society members on a January 22 Teleforum conference call. A recording of their presentation is available here. Randall Guynn, Prof. David Skeel, and James Wigand offered their defense of SPOE and their response to Mr. Kupiec and Mr. Wallison on a Teleforum conference call. -- Featuring: Randall Guynn, Partner, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP; Prof. David Skeel, S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School; and James Wigand, Partner, Millstein & Co.

Endangered Species Act listing settlements between the Environmental Protection Agency and private parties have not always allowed state participation or input. Truncated legal proceedings may not sufficiently recognize private partnerships with states to remedy habitat conservation concerns. State actors, energy industries, ranchers, and private property owners have asked how the process may better serve all interests. As some states face settlement decrees that represent potentially dozens – to over a hundred – new listings, is there a way to ensure equity and full process for all concerned parties? -- Featuring: Hon. Susan Combs, Former Comptroller of Public Accounts, State of Texas; Prof. Justin Pidot, University of Denver Sturm College of Law; and William Yeatman, Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Members of the Federalist Society’s Financial Services & E-Commerce Practice Group Executive Committee provided an update on recent important activity at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Recent developments included a CFPB study on the Military Lending Act, activity at the FDIC related to Operation Chokepoint, the Independent Community Bankers Association survey of the effect of CFPB regulations on residential mortgage lending, and also a recent Harvard study about the effect of the Dodd-Frank Act on community banks. -- Featuring: Hon. Wayne A. Abernathy, Executive VP for Financial Institutions Policy and Regulatory Affairs, American Bankers Association and Prof. Todd J. Zywicki, Foundation Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law

In December of 2014, Microsoft filed a brief with the Federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York to prevent the U.S. Department of Justice from seizing a customer’s data stored in Dublin, Ireland. It’s a case that raises important questions about the right of Americans to know what the government and companies are doing with sensitive electronic data. How do we ensure accountability both to the law through reasonable regulation, and to the courts through effective judicial review? The case also raises questions about the rights of people in other countries. Will they continue to have their privacy rights protected by their own laws? Anticipating a world where every device is a connected device, these are but a few of the important questions raised by this case regarding the future of privacy and regulations going forward. -- Featuring: James M. Garland, Partner, Covington & Burling LLP and David Howard, Corporate Vice President & Deputy General Counsel, Microsoft