Historians of Mormonism File Amici Brief in Hawaii v. Trump

Nineteen “scholars of American religious history and law, with special expertise and familiarity with the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the travel ban case Hawaii v. Trump in the Ninth Circuit.  As the Desert News explains, it argues that “American Mormons still endure 'pernicious consequences' created by U.S. government discrimination against them in the 1800s.”

Pfander and Hunt on Private Bills and Govermental Accountability

James E. Pfander, Northwestern University School of Law and Jonathan L. Hunt, Mayer, Brown & Platt, have posted Public Wrongs and Private Bills: Indemnification and Government Accountability in the Early Republic. It is forthcoming in the New York University Law Review and may usefully be read alongside Jerry Mashaw's articles on the "lost century" of administrative law, here, here, here, and here which I recently had the pleasure of reviewing for a conference on the forthcoming book manuscript hosted by Timothy Lytton at the Albany Law School. Here is the abstract for Pfander's and Hunt's paper:

Students of the history of administrative law in the United States regard the antebellum era as one in which strict common law rules of official liability prevailed. Yet conventional accounts of the antebellum period often omit a key institutional feature. Under the system of private legislation in place at the time, federal government officers were free to petition Congress for the passage of a private bill appropriating money to reimburse the officer for personal liability imposed on the basis of actions taken in the line of duty. Captain Little, the officer involved in one oft-cited case, Little v. Barreme, pursued this avenue of indemnification successfully. As a result, the ultimate loss associated with that officer’s good faith effort to enforce federal law fell on the government rather than on the officer himself.

This paper fills out the picture of government accountability in the early nineteenth century by clarifying the practice of congressional indemnification. After identifying cases in which officers sought indemnity from Congress through a petition for private relief, we examine the way official liability, as administered by the courts, interacted with private legislation, as administered by Congress, to shape the incentives of government officers to comply with the law. We find that a practice of relatively routine indemnification took the sting out of sovereign immunity, a doctrine that key players – including James Madison and John Marshall – treated as thinly formalistic. We also find that Congress assumed responsibility for deciding when federal officers were entitled to indemnity for acts taken in the scope of employment.

The antebellum system thus contrasts sharply with modern government accountability law. Jurists today tend to regard sovereign immunity as a barrier to relief, rather than a principle of forum allocation that preserves legislative primacy in the adoption of money bills. Moreover, courts today often refrain from deciding the question of formal legality in an effort to strike a proper balance between the victim’s interest in accountability and the official’s interest in immunity. Whatever the wisdom of the resulting body of qualified immunity law, the doctrine reflects judicial control of matters that the early republic had assigned to the legislative branch.

Tidmarsh and Figley on The Appropriations Power and Sovereign Immunity

The Appropriations Power and Sovereign Immunity is a new article by Jay Tidmarsh, Notre Dame Law School and Paul Figley, Washington College of Law, American University. It will appear in the Michigan Law Review (2009). Here's the abstract:

Historical discussions of sovereign immunity assume that the Constitution contains no explicit text regarding sovereign immunity. As a result, arguments about the existence -- or non-existence -- of sovereign immunity begin with the English and American common-law doctrines of sovereign immunity, and ask whether the founding period altered that doctrine. Exploring political, fiscal, and legal developments in England and the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this article shows that focusing on common-law developments is misguided. The common-law approach to sovereign immunity ended in the early 1700s. The Bankers' Case (1690-1700), which is often regarded as the first modern common-law treatment of sovereign immunity, is in fact the last in the line of English common-law decisions on sovereign immunity. After (and in part because of) the Bankers' Case, settling claims against the Crown became a function for Parliament, swept up within its newly won powers over finance and appropriations. The principle of legislative supremacy over appropriations effectively replaced the principle of common-law sovereign immunity. Examining the salience of this thesis for the American colonies, the Confederation, and the formation of the Constitution, the article demonstrates that the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution embedded a principle of congressional supremacy over the handling of monetary claims against the United States. The view that the Appropriations Clause prevented judicial determination of monetary claims against the United States was shared in early cases and by early commentators, whose views have since disappeared in discussions over the scope of sovereign immunity.