Talk:Muskrat v. United States

Public defenders?

Why doesn't this ruling apply to cases where defendents are represented by public defenders, and where thus prosecutors and defense attorneys are both being paid by the same body (usually the state government)? --Jfruh (talk) 04:29, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Who paid for whom is not the dispositive fact. The problem was the law here allowed for the U.S. and Indian tribes to collude together in a court case just to test the constitutionality of laws, without there being an actual dispute. Obviously criminal prosecutions are not "collusive" or seeking only "advisory opinions"; the party to a criminal prosecution is the defendant, not the public defender. And obviously there's no constitutional problem with public defenders being paid by the government, given that the constitution requires it when defendants can't afford it. postdlf (talk) 13:09, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

I guess it's just not clear to me what about the circumstances of the case led the court to deem it "collusive"; the only reason the article gives is that the Congress authorized payment for lawyers on both sides of the case, but obviously that's not enough (I brought up the public defender angle to illustrate this). The party to this case was, as near as I can tell, the Indians who filed the suit, not the Congressionally-funded lawyer. Is it because the Congressional law explicitly allowed the suits to test the constitutionality of the previous law? Were the Indians not actually interested in the outcome of the case, and merely filed it at the behest of Congress?

I should add that I'm not trying to say that the court's reasoning was wrong or anything; I'm just asking questions that I hope will ultimately make the article clearer. I'm not a lawyer but I like to think I'm no dummy, and I'm having trouble figuring out from the text here just what the court found wanting about this case. --Jfruh (talk) 15:04, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

It's not a great article yet. But who covered the costs of the lawsuit isn't the issue. The bottom line principle this case stands for is that the Constitution's Case or Controversy Clause in Article III restricts federal courts from hearing cases brought by parties that don't have anything concrete at stake. The Court didn't think any of the involved parties actually had rights at issue, and federal courts can't decide points of law in the abstract (i.e., render advisory opinions). I think this is the operative language in the Court's opinion:

"The whole purpose of the law is to determine the constitutional validity of this class of legislation, in a suit not arising between parties concerning a property right necessarily involved in the decision in question, but in a proceeding against the government in its sovereign capacity, and concerning which the only judgment required is to settle the doubtful character of the legislation in question. Such judgment will not conclude private parties, when actual litigation brings to the court the question of the constitutionality of such legislation. In a legal sense, the judgment could not be executed, and amounts in fact to no more than an expression of opinion upon the validity of the acts in question." 219 U.S. at 361-62 (emphasis added).

I can't say I have a clear sense of the facts, so I don't know if the Court today would consider there to be no controversy. But the Court would rule that, for example, there was no case or controversy if I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a law prohibiting the sale of dog fighting videos, but I failed to allege that I actually sold dog fighting videos, or anything else to establish that I engaged in conduct that risked prosecution under that law. I couldn't sue to protect the right of others who were selling the videos. See also Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife. postdlf (talk) 15:35, 7 October 2010 (UTC)