Religious Entities Flex Their Muscles Through the Roberts Court, Playing Both Sides of the Discrimination Coin

MARCI A. HAMILTON

Marci A. Hamilton, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the country’s leading church-state scholars, describe how legal entities wielded their religious identity as both a shield and a sword last term before the U.S. Supreme Court. Hamilton points out that religious entities won key cases that allow them to receive from government funding while enjoying exemptions from neutral generally applicable non-discrimination laws.

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Ryze Claims Solutions, LLC v. Magnus-Stinson

Docket: 19-2930

Opinion Date: August 3, 2020

Judge: Kenneth Francis Ripple

Areas of Law: Civil Procedure, Contracts

RYZE, an Indiana business, employs remote workers across the U.S., including Billings, who signed an employment agreement with a forum‐selection clause providing for litigation in an Indiana state court or in the Southern District of Indiana. Billings filed suit in California state court. alleging state law claims and violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, on behalf of himself and other current and former RYZE employees nationwide. RYZE removed the action to the Eastern District of California, which concluded that Billings had failed to show why the forum‐selection clause should not control and transferred venue under 28 U.S.C. 1404(a) to the Southern District of Indiana. That court granted RYZE summary judgment on Billings’s federal claims. The district court then, sua sponte, returned the case to the Eastern District of California, explaining that its docket was congested and that the California court was familiar with California labor law. When the case was docketed again in the Eastern District of California, RYZE petitioned the Seventh Circuit for a writ of mandamus directing the Southern District of Indiana to request that the Eastern District of California return the action to the Southern District of Indiana. The Seventh Circuit granted that petition, noting that forum‐selection clauses should be given “'controlling weight in all but the most exceptional cases.’” No exceptional circumstances exist here.

Adams v. Board of Education Harvey School District 152

Dockets: 19-3269, 19-2534

Opinion Date: August 3, 2020

Judge: Frank Hoover Easterbrook

Areas of Law: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Education Law, Labor & Employment Law

Adams, superintendent of the school district in 2013-2016, requested a forensic audit of the district’s expenditures and subsequently had disputes with board members that involved Adams filing a police complaint. The Board of Education revoked an offer to extend her three-year contract. Adams suspended the district’s business manager for financial irregularities. The Board blocked her email and told state education officials that Adams was no longer superintendent. Adams filed suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983. A jury awarded $400,000 in damages. The Seventh Circuit affirmed, finding that the police report was not a personal grievance, but a matter of public concern within the scope of the First Amendment. The potential for physical altercations between public officials implies that an important public institution was not working properly, particularly given that a proposed forensic audit “seems to have unsettled at least one" Board member. The police report and the controversy more generally could have affected the outcome of elections and the daily management of the school system. The record permitted a reasonable jury to find that an ordinary employee in Adams’s position would be deterred from speaking by the prospect of losing her job and was permitted to consider the possibility that Adams would have remained on the job longer had she kept silent. Damages for a First Amendment violation are not limited by the duration of contracts.

United States v. Howard

Docket: 19-1005

Opinion Date: August 3, 2020

Judge: Diane S. Sykes

Areas of Law: Criminal Law

Howard was charged with seven crimes relating to possession, receipt, distribution, and production of child pornography, 18 U.S.C. 2252(a)(2), (a)(4). He pleaded guilty to five; the remaining counts, under section 2251(a), proceeded to trial. The statute mandates a minimum 15-year prison term for “[a]ny person who employs, uses, persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any minor to engage in … any sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct.” Howard’s videos do not depict a child engaged in sexually explicit conduct; they show Howard masturbating next to a fully clothed and sleeping child. The government’s theory was that Howard violated the statute by “using” the clothed, sleeping child as an object of sexual interest to produce a visual depiction of himself engaged in solo sexually explicit conduct. The jury found him guilty. The Seventh Circuit vacated the convictions on the two counts. The government’s interpretation of section 2251(a) “stretches the statute beyond the natural reading of its terms considered in context.” The government’s “implausible” interpretation, taken to its logical conclusion, would not require the presence of a child on camera; the crime could be committed even if the child who is the object of the offender’s sexual interest were across the street.