Public rights and standing

Owen Smitherman has posted "History, Public Rights, and Article III Standing", forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. The abstract:

For decades, legal academics have complained about a conflict between history and the doctrine of Article III standing. First in Spokeo v. Robins (2016) and then notably in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez (2021), Justice Clarence Thomas presented a halfway resolution. Thomas grounded Article III standing in a historical distinction between private and public rights. Suits for violations of private rights would require no showing of concrete injury-in-fact. Suits for violations of public rights would require the showing of special damage, a term borrowed from the public nuisance tort.

This Article questions this effective retention of injury-in-fact for public rights actions. In Part I, I explain Justice Thomas’s nuanced approach to Article III standing. In Part II, I investigate old English and early American materials on special damage to flesh out the meaning of Thomas’s requirement for public rights standing. I find a lack of historical consensus on the content of the special damage standard. Some materials go this way, others go that way, and still others another way. The materials do not align on a precise standard, making it difficult, either as a matter of 1788 original meaning or later liquidation, to operationalize Thomas’s special damage requirement. In Part III, I argue that there are good reasons to doubt that the requirement of special damage is constitutionally relevant to the original meaning of Article III. The Framers did not discuss special damage in relation to Article III. The traditional rationale for the specific damage requirement does not have constitutional significance. And it seems implausible that the Constitution incorporated a legal doctrine in such flux without textual indication. In conclusion, I critique the current Court’s lack of attention to original meaning for Article III standing.

Justice Thomas (Stetson University)

Nature versus the common law

A little while back I published "Nature Versus the Common Law: Nature as a Norm in the Water Law of the British World" in the French journal Clio@Themis. The article explores some of the areas of water law in which courts around the common law world departed from the established rules of the common law in order to make the legal rules more appropriate, as they saw it, to the local environment. As the article shows, they did so consciously, explicitly granting nature normative force. It also looks at other courts and judges, ones that resisted this kind of normative claim, arguing that the law in new environments had to conform to the old common-law rules, regardless of what nature seemed to demand. 

The question of whether environmental factors required or justified a departure from the inherited rules of the common law arose in courts around British Empire and United States in connection with a variety of legal issues, four of which are examined in the article: a) the question of whether the water, bed, or other resources of a non-tidal river belonged to the riparian landowners or to the state or public ; b) conflicts over property rights following shifts in the course of a river ; c) the issue of the degree of liability of reservoir owners for damage caused to others by escaping waters ; and d) conflicts over whether water might be diverted from a river for irrigation, to the detriment of downstream landowners.

Discovery of the Hudson River, Albert Bierstadt, 1874

I'll be posting some selections from the article later.

The conservation constitution

A recent issue of Perspectives on Politics has a review by Richard Andrews of Kimberly K. Smith's The Conservation Constitution: The Conservation Movement and Constitutional Change, 1870–1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2020). Andrews writes that while existing works on the history of US conservation policy "focus on the policies expressed in statutes and regulations and on the actions of the administrative agencies, with only limited mention of the legal and constitutional arguments that were battled out in the courts", Smith's book "provides a valuable new complement to these studies by presenting a far more detailed history of the legal and constitutional arguments presented to and ultimately decided by the courts during the period from 1870 to 1930". Andrews continues:

Smith’s primary aim, well summarized in the final chapter (pp. 254ff.), is “to explain how lawyers and judges reworked constitutional doctrine to accommodate the expansion of state power over the natural environment during the Progressive era; and more specifically, how legal decisionmakers conceptualized the natural environment, its relation to human society, and the public interests at stake to create the constitutional ‘common sense’ that federal and state governments have authority to protect natural resources and the integrity of ecosystems in the interest of future generations.” In the process, she discusses the interweaving of principles such as the public trust doctrine, the police power, public nuisance doctrine, parens patriae standing, the interstate compacts clause, and federal constitutional arguments based on the interstate and foreign commerce, property, war, treaty, spending, and eminent domain powers, as well as the interstate nuisance doctrine. She argues that even though many of these issues continue to be argued in the modern era, the sheer number of these constitutional foundations, once accepted by the courts, has ultimately made governmental environmental management authority strongly resilient to challenges. She also urges greater recognition of the roles of skilled lawyers and judges, along with the better-known politicians and citizen advocates, in achieving this stronger role for the state in environmental conservation. Finally, she notes the continuing need for further evolution of our understanding of the Constitution: the Progressive understanding did not address the distributive imperfections of environmental regulation, nor the implications of administrative processes for procedural justice, nor—perhaps most problematic today—the absence of effective capacity for national economic and environmental planning, particularly in international cooperation to address global environmental challenges such as climate change. 

 After some minor criticisms, Andrews adds: 

Coke, Popham, and Commissions of Sewers

Eric Ash's The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (JHU Press, 2016) was recently reviewed by Bob Silvester in Environment and History (for an interview with the author see here). Famous common law judges play a big role in this story. The review reports that Ash:

Sir John Popham,
copy by George Perfect Harding, after unknown

succeeds admirably though is in fleshing out the procedures – there is a masterly commentary on the commissions of sewers – and events that have been dealt with only cursorily in the past. Lord Chief Justice Popham’s plans to dry out the Great Level, which resulted in little more than the construction of a large drain known as Popham’s Eau lying east of March in Cambridgeshire, seemed an obscure event when I worked in the Fens in the 1980s...; just what Popham sought to achieve and how it fitted into the overall sequence of drainage ventures is now much clearer through the careful analysis of archival material.

Regarding the author's statement that his "principal goal is to use the drainage projects to connect the broader political, economic, social and environmental developments of the era", Silvester writes that "there are times when fenland drainage appears to be subsumed within a broader discourse as simply an outstanding example of state-building in progress. It accounts for the lengthy digression on Lord Chief Justice Coke’s interference in fenland affairs around 1609".

For more on Commissions of Sewers and drainage law, see here.

Inter-imperial riparian law VI: Miner as an inter-imperial legal authority and Conclusion

On Friday we discussed the place of French and American law in Privy Council water decisions, leading up to the seminal 1858 case of Miner v. Gilmour. Today we'll look at how Miner became an inter-imperial authority, as Lord Kingsdown's summary of the relative rights of riparian owners was cited widely throughout the British Empire and beyond (for examples of the case's influence, see the article on which this series is based).

Though arising in a case in which the applicable law was the old French law of Canada East, on the imperial periphery, it was taken as a faithful exposition of the common law of England, the imperial metropolis. In the 1876 case of Lyon v. Fishmongers’ Company, for instance, dealing with the right of access of riparian owners to the River Thames, the House of Lords (at the time the highest court for cases arising in Britain itself) referred to it as one of ‘the best authorities’ on riparian doctrine.

"a lord of appeal" [Colin Blackburn].
(Spy, Vanity Fair, 19 Nov. 1881)

Perhaps the most interesting reliance on Miner (for our purposes) in the water jurisprudence of the British Empire came in two decisions authored by the British judge Colin Blackburn. In the House of Lords case of Orr Ewing v. Colquhoun (1877), Blackburn rejected the rule of Scottish law applied by the Scottish court below, arguing (inter alia), "If such be the law of Scotland it is different from what Lord Kingsdown, in [Miner v. Gilmour], states to be the law of England and France". Lord Blackburn, it seems, was ready to modify the law of the metropolis (albeit of Scotland, a jurisdiction of secondary importance, and one in which the civil law, not the common law, applied), bending it to conform to the law as laid down in Miner, a case governed by the law of a foreign empire.

A few years later came Commissioners of French Hoek v. Hugo, an appeal to the Privy Council of a judgment of the supreme court of the Cape Colony, in today’s South Africa.  Governing the dispute over the waters of two small watercourses was what is known as Roman-Dutch law. This was the law in force in the Cape Colony when it was ceded by the Dutch to the British at the end of the Napoleonic wars (the metropolitan Netherlands had by this point adopted the Napoleonic Code for use in the home country), and, as the colony had been conquered from another state, not “settled”, this was the law that remained in force under British rule. Like the pre-Revolutionary French law in force in Quebec, Roman-Dutch law was based largely on the writings of learned ‘civilian’ jurists writing in the Roman law tradition. Indeed, in addition to Cape Colony cases and Roman-Dutch sources, lawyers for the appellants cited French treatises in support of their argument.

Writing for the Privy Council in French Hoek, Lord Blackburn referred approvingly to the summary of the law of riparian rights in Miner v. Gilmour, seeming to attach some importance to the similar positions of the Roman-influenced civil law in Canada East and the Cape Colony:

Inter-imperial riparian law V: Encounters of legal empires in Miner?

Yesterday I discussed why American water law may have been attractive to judges applying French law in Canada. Today we move the focus back to London and the Privy Council:

The reliance by counsel in Miner v. Gilmour on American sources for a question of French law, along with the court’s conflation of the French law and the common law (discussed in Part III of this series), would seem to be a faithful expression of the water law of Canada East, with its own heavy reliance on American sources and blending of the French law and common law, often by way of citing those same American sources.

W. Holman Hunt, The Right Hon. Stephen Lushington (1862)
(Victorian Web)

Moreover, the incorporation of the civil law into the common law of waters and the export of this mélange throughout the common-law world might be seen as the product not only of a one-time encounter with the law of Canada East in Miner v. Gilmour, but of an ongoing engagement with this odd jurisdiction, at once an integral part of the ascendant British Empire and the offspring of the old French Empire. Thus we find the Lower Canada case of St. Louis v. St. Louis, discussed earlier for Chief Justice Sewell’s use of Kent as authority for a point of French law, making its way to the Privy Council in 1841. The judge who delivered the judgment of the Judicial Committee, Stephen Lushington, a prominent and knowledgeable English civilian lawyer (he was a judge on ecclesiastical and admiralty courts, enclaves of civil law in the English legal system), was also a member of the panel that decided Miner v. Gilmour. Might the bold statement of the court in Miner, according to which riparian rights in the common law were essentially the same as in the civil law, have been influenced by Lushington’s exposure to precisely this attitude by the American-Canadian judge Sewell in St. Louis?

Sewell’s view in St. Louis may have influenced the common law of waters through yet another route, as well. Sitting alongside Lushington on the Judicial Committee to hear the appeal of Sewell’s judgment in St. Louis v. St. Louis was James Parke, the dominant judge on the English Court of Exchequer. Within the decade, his court decided two cases—Wood v. Waud and Embrey v. Owen—which were the first English cases to adopt the American law of riparian rights, relying heavily on Kent, Tyler v. Wilkinson, and French sources.  Could the Lower Canada case of St. Louis v. St. Louis have made an impression on Baron Parke, leading his court to base modern English riparian law on French and American sources?

Here we encounter a methodological difficulty—distinguishing between inter-imperial influences on the one hand, and transnational influences of the ‘ordinary’ kind, between two national jurisdictions, whether imperial metropolises or not, on the other. Put more concretely, was the intermixture of the laws of the old French Empire and the new American one in the courts of the British Empire a true inter-imperial encounter? Or might it be better conceived of as a case of British judges being influenced by the laws of France and the United States, two national jurisdictions the laws of which they were inclined to consider by factors such as geographic proximity, cultural affinity, common legal origins and the availability of law books, independently of their crossed imperial histories?

Inter-imperial riparian law IV: The attraction of American law

Yesterday I discussed the extensive use water law judicial decisions in the courts of Lower Canada, with its pre-revolutionary French property law, made of American sources. Today I discuss why they may have looked to a jurisdiction that had never belonged to the old empire from which the local law derived, and no longer belonged to the new empire of which Canada was now a part.

 Hon. Justice T.C. Aylwin (Library and Archives Canada)

In his dissent in the 1859 case of Boswell v. Denis Judge Aylwin indicated one reason why Canadians may have preferred American law over French in some cases. According to French law, a ‘navigable and floatable’ river was a public one, in which the public enjoyed rights that could not be impaired by the riparian owners. As the river in question in Boswell, the Jacques-Cartier, contained rapids and was therefore not ‘navigable’ by boat traffic, the majority of the court straightforwardly applied the French test and ruled that it could not be considered a public river. Aylwin objected to this analysis: ‘Our rivers cannot be compared with those of France or Europe; the Jacques Cartier is a good sized river and has plenty of water,—it has rapids it is true, but […] I believe the river to be both navigable and flottable.’ Following a tradition going back to Montesquieu and further, Aylwin argued that French law could not apply unmodified in North America, as it was developed for a different set of environmental circumstances. Similarly, in a 1905 case Justice Trenholme of the Quebec King’s Bench noted that American authorities on the question of navigability ‘possess more than ordinary interest for Canadian Courts, as the conditions there were and are precisely like those in our country’.

Yet it seems this was not the only reason for Canadians’ turn to American water law. Returning to Brown v. Gugy, it is significant that the American case which Judge Aylwin preferred over the lower court’s ruling was from Louisiana, the only American state which based its legal system on (French) civil law. Moreover, Kent’s discussion of water law (like his discussions of many other subjects) was replete with references to civilian sources. In the pages quoted in Aylwin’s opinion (sections 6 and 7 of Kent’s Lecture 52), the American jurist cited a large number of American and English cases, as was appropriate for a work purporting to be a commentary on American law, but his very first citations were to civilian sources: Justinian’s Digest, Pothier’s Traité du Contrat de Société and Toullier’s Droit Civil Français. Later in the section, he cited again to Pothier, quoted with approval a maxim of Roman law and stated that the Code Napoléon established the same rule as said maxim.

Later commentators have divided as to what extent Kent’s use of civilian sources was substantial or rather mere window dressing, with Alan Watson arguing that Kent’s use of the Roman and French sources in the section cited above was riddled with errors and that it provided little support to his exposition of riparian rights.  Nonetheless it seems that Judge Aylwin saw Kent as a good civilian source, prefacing his long quote from the Commentaries thus:

Inter-imperial riparian law III: American sources of French-Canadian water law

Continuing where yesterday's post left off:

Canada’s broad St. Lawrence River and its tributaries were the sites of intensive water use in the mid-nineteenth century. They served as fishing grounds, highways for water craft, conduits for floating logs and sources of power for both traditional grist mills and new industrial facilities. Uses and users often came into conflict, and these conflicts often landed up in court.

Jonathan Sewell
(Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1900)

The earliest fully reported case of this type was the 1832 case of Oliva v. Boissonnault. James Oliva sued Nicolas Boissonnault in the court of King’s Bench, District of Quebec, for placing obstructions in the Rivière du Sud, blocking the floating of logs downstream to the St. Lawrence. Chief Justice Jonathan Sewell ruled for Oliva, explaining that under French law the public had a right of passage on every stream capable of floating logs or rafts. Alongside his discussion of French law, he noted that the public’s right was the same in England and America, citing Kent’s Commentaries with regard to the latter. Two years later St. Louis v. St. Louis, another water law dispute, reached the courts. This time the case involved a riparian landholder diverting water through a canal to his sawmill so that it bypassed the gristmill and carding and fulling mill of his downstream neighbours. Sewell, sitting this time in the Provincial Court of Appeals, again cited Kent, here in support of the proposition that a riparian landowner might ‘conduct such portion of the stream as he requires for the amelioration of his - property by canals or otherwise through the extent of the land which he occupies, but he must return it to the stream before it reaches the confines of his neighbour’s estate’.

The Pope, the Archbishop, and the Poet

(A little off the beaten path for this blog, but--despite the title--not a joke.
Thanks to Bruce Huber, John Langbein, and Shai Wozner for introducing me to the sources in this post.)

I. The Pope

Last year I was fortunate to be invited by Bruce Huber to participate in a great little conference on Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si'. The conference and reading the encyclical got me thinking about the relationship between law, religion, and urgent matters of policy (such as the environment and social justice), with some help from a classic source in English legal history courses (see below). More specifically, it got me thinking about the relative absence of law in contemporary discussions of religion and the environment, exemplified by Laudato Si'.

Reading the document with legal eyes, one thing that caught my attention was the essentially legal argument that the Pope makes about the responsibility of privileged classes and nations towards those less fortunate. Put simply, Francis argues that the earth's resources are the common property of humankind, and that disproportional exploitation by some creates a debt towards those who have benefited less from the common property:

Whether believers or not, we are agreed today that the earth is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone. For believers, this becomes a question of fidelity to the Creator, since God created the world for everyone. (93)

The natural environment is a collective good, the patrimony of all humanity and the responsibility of everyone. If we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all. If we do not, we burden our consciences with the weight of having denied the existence of others. (95) 

The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. (23)

Gorsuch and Hamburger

A few months ago we noted some of the environmental dimensions of Philip Hamburger's revisionist account of the history of administrative law. Now Eric Posner points out some contemporary relevance of Hamburger's controversial views (thanks to Legal History Blog for flagging the post, and to Eric for approving the re-post):

Judge Gorsuch has approvingly cited Philip Hamburger’s book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, in three opinions.* That is three times the number of opinions citing Hamburger’s book written by all the judges in all the federal circuit courts put together. Is this a matter of significance?

Hamburger argues that “administrative power” is unconstitutional. This is a radical view. I mean a radical view in the sense that, if taken seriously, it would require the invalidation of much of the administrative state. Agencies like EPA and the Fed could continue to exist, but only to gather facts, monitor industry, and bring claims against people and companies based on statutes enacted by Congress. They would not be allowed to issue regulations, that is, rules. Only Congress could do that.

I do not think that this vision is acceptable to the public, or really anyone, not even business, which says that it opposes regulation but in fact depends on it more often than not. But his view is an appealing fantasy, and it has excited the conservative legal community. It’s much easier to say “it’s all unconstitutional” than to explain why this regulation or that one is unwise or illegal.

In rereading Hamburger, I am struck by three themes, which resonate with our political times.

Oliver Wendell Holmes and water pollution

Yesterday's edition of This Day in Water History notes the anniversary of a historic interstate lawsuit over water pollution, Missouri v Illinois (1906). See my own take after the jump.

January 17, 1900: Fifteen days after Chicago opened the Sanitary and Ship Canal and reversed the course of the Chicago River to discharge sewage into the Mississippi River, Missouri sued Illinois, “…praying for an injunction against the defendants from draining into Mississippi River the sewage and drainage of said sanitary district by way of the Chicago drainage canal and the channels of Desplaines and Illinois river.”

The Bill of Complaint alleged in part:

“That if such plan is carried out it will cause such sewage matter to flow into Mississippi River past the homes and waterworks systems of the inhabitants of the complainant…

That the amount of such undefecated [huh?] sewage matter would be about 1,500 tons daily, and that it will poison the waters of the Mississippi and render them unfit for domestic use, amounting to a direct and continuing nuisance that will endanger the health and lives and irreparably injure the business interests of inhabitants of the complainant…

That the water of the canal had destroyed the value of the water of the Mississippi for drinking and domestic purposes, and had caused much sickness to persons living along the banks of said river in the State of Missouri.”

The opinion in the case was written by Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes and read in part:

“The data upon which an increase in the deaths from typhoid fever in St. Louis is alleged are disputed. The elimination of other causes is denied. The experts differ as to the time and distance within which a stream would purify itself. No case of an epidemic caused by infection at so remote a source is brought forward and the cases which are produced are controverted. The plaintiff obviously must be cautious upon this point, for if this suit should succeed many others would follow, and it not improbably would find itself a defendant to a bill by one or more of the States lower down upon the Mississippi. The distance which the sewage has to travel (357 miles) is not open to debate, but the time of transit to he inferred from experiments with floats is estimated at varying from eight to eighteen and a half days, with forty-eight hours more from intake to distribution, and when corrected by observations of bacteria is greatly prolonged by the defendants. The experiments of the defendants’ experts lead them to the opinion that a typhoid bacillus could not survive the journey, while those on the other side maintain that it might live and keep its power for twenty-five days or more, and arrive at St. Louis. Upon the question at issue, whether the new discharge from Chicago hurts St. Louis, there is a categorical contradiction between the experts on the two sides.”

Commentary: In effect, Justice Holmes ruled in favor of Chicago. The experts for St. Louis had failed to prove their case.

Reference: Leighton, Marshall O. 1907. “Pollution of Illinois and Mississippi Rivers by Chicago Sewage: A Digest of the Testimony Taken in the Case of the State of Missouri v. the State of Illinois and the Sanitary District of Chicago.” U.S. Geological Survey, Water Supply and Irrigation Paper No. 194, Series L, Quality of Water, 20, Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.