March 30, 2022:- The Appeals Court has ruled that two District Court judges should not have prohibited a woman from posting anything online about the lawyer she and her husband had hired.
According to the lawyer, the couple had made statements on Facebook “calling us thiefs [sic]” and criticizing the lawyer in emails that cc’d other people. On the strength of this, first one judge (in Leominster District Court) then another (in Worcester District Court) issued a harassment prevention order under G.L. c. 258E. As the name suggests, harassment prevention orders are supposed to prevent harassment, not to prevent criticism. Nevertheless, two separate judges employed the harassment-prevention law to ban constitutionally-protected speech.
The Leominster judge issued the order on June 25, 2021, and the Worcester judge extended it on July 9, 2021 for a period of one year. The orders banned the defendant — the lawyer’s former client — from uttering any statements about the lawyer via “Internet or social media posts.” More than 8 months later, on March 30, 2022, the Appeals Court vacated the gag order. The part of the decision titled Discussion begins with this clear statement:
There is no basis in the record on which a c. 258E order could lawfully have issued.
Then the Appeals Court points out that the lawyer did not claim that the ex-client ever uttered any threats, and that nothing in the lawyer’s complaint described conduct that could qualify as “harassment,” which the statute defines in this way:
(i) 3 or more acts of willful and malicious conduct aimed at a specific person committed with the intent to cause fear, intimidation, abuse or damage to property and that does in fact cause fear, intimidation, abuse or damage to property; or (ii) an act that: (A) by force, threat or duress causes another to involuntarily engage in sexual relations; or (B) constitutes a violation of section 13B, 13F, 13H, 22, 22A, 23, 24, 24B, 26C, 43 or 43A of chapter 265 or section 3 of chapter 272.
To run afoul of the statute, a person needs to engage in three or more acts. Those acts need to be willful and malicious. The person must intend the acts to cause fear, intimidation, abuse or damage to property. And each of the three acts must, in fact, cause fear, intimidation, abuse or damage to property.
The appellate courts have consistently construed this definition so that it does not (or, at least, should not) discourage people, still less prohibit them, from engaging in the sort of robust back-and-forth speech that is essential in a self-governing republic of free people. To put it another way, no appellate court in Massachusetts has ever held that criticism of a lawyer by a disgruntled former client constitutes harassment under chapter 258E, still less that the offending speech warranted a comprehensive year-long ban on the mere utterance of the lawyer’s name online.
On the bright side, the lawyer’s ex-client had the wherewithal to hire another lawyer to file a successful appeal. But it is truly galling that a resident of Massachusetts should have to take a case up to the Appeals Court in order to vindicate her right to speak freely. It is more than galling that a lawyer and two judges (all of whom took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, which still includes the First Amendment) all considered it OK to quash free speech. After all, even today — in the Trudeau-pian era of ochlocracy, Big Tech/Big Pharma shut-uppery, and the categorization of “misleading narratives that undermine public trust in US government institutions” as terrorism — this area of Massachusetts law is absolutely clear. It has been particularly clear since 2016 when the Supreme Judicial Court explained (because it was, sadly, necessary to explain) that judges really should not ban political candidates from mentioning the names of their opponents at election time. For my post on that decision, click here (quick, before they ban it).
So, three cheers for the Appeals Court justices and no cheers at all for the District Court judges who issued the gag order in the first place.
February 18, 2022:- Yesterday the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sent a vaccine-mandate case back down to the District Court for the judge to re-consider the employees’ request for a preliminary injunction. The case is Sambrano, et al, v. United Airlines, Inc., United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas USDC 4:21-CV-1074.
The employees are suing the employer because the employer requires them to receive a COVID-19 vaccination. The District Court had denied the employees’ request for a preliminary injunction on the grounds that the employees could not show “irreparable injury,” but the Court of Appeals disagreed:
Plaintiffs allege a harm that is ongoing and cannot be remedied later: they are actively being coerced to violate their religious convictions. Because that harm is irreparable, we reverse the district court.
August 4, 2021:- If you lie awake worrying that there are too few people incarcerated, too few criminal offenses on the statute books, and too much unregulated speech (in fact altogether too much unregulated human activity in general) rest easy. Help is at hand. The Massachusetts Legislature is considering a bill that would criminalize videos that make it look as if people are saying things that they did not really say.
It seems unlikely that the bill, H. 1755, sponsored by Representative Jay D. Livingstone, will become law, not this session anyway. It is a refile of H. 3366, which he filed in 2019. For reasons that I explain below, I hope this bill does not become law, not this session, not next session, not ever.
The clue is in the typo
Whoever drafted the bill apparently drew inspiration, and most of the text, from a federal bill titled the Malicious Deep Fake Prohibition Act of 2018 filed by United States Senator Bill Sasse (R – Nebraska). If you want to read Attorney Nina Iacono Brown’s critique in Slate of Senator Sasse’s bill and similar proposals, click here.
Copying another legislator’s bill is not a violation of the Copyright Act, of course (on which subject see below). In fact, they should have gone the whole hog and copied the title too. Because what did the drafters choose as a moniker for Representative Livingstone’s adaptation of Senator Sasse’s bill? They called it “An Act to protect against deep fakes used to facilitate torturous or criminal conduct.”
Aside from the irony-laden, Freudian-slippy typo (I am quite sure that they meant to write “tortious” not “torturous”) it’s just too much of a mouthful. But that problem is a small one compared with the bill’s potential impact on freedom of expression. It would hand the shut-uppers yet another tool with which to silence heterodox speakers.
Trust me, I’m from Big Tech
H. 1755 was on the agenda for the Joint Committee on the Judiciary on July 27, 2021. If you would like to watch the relevant part of the hearing, click here and scroll to 1:09:40. There you can see and hear testimony from Nick Gatz, manager of State Government Relations for Adobe, who states that the company is neutral on H.1755 and offers the Legislature its expertise “on the topic of content manipulation and online misinformation,” which is the sort of thing Adobe is against, I gather.
Adobe is so very much against content manipulation and online misinformation that it has established an entity called the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. If that name was approved by a focus group, I am quite sure that its members either: (a) had no familiarity with Orwell’s 1984; or (b) considered the book to have been not so much a cautionary tale as an instruction manual.
Coalition of the all too willing
The purpose of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity? To deploy technology that will help us — naïve saps that we are — sort the real-news wheat from the fake-news chaff, thereby obviating the need for legislation. Why should politicians bother to extend control over online speech with laws (laws that could conceivably be struck down by bothersome judges or repealed by the great unwashed) when Big Tech has an app for that? If the alternative to the Act to Protect Against Deep Fakes Used to Facilitate Torturous or Criminal Conduct is the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, forgive me for not sighing with relief.
One of the more famous members of the coalition is Twitter, the company that (like Google’s YouTube) runs advertisements for the Chinese government, says the Columbia Journalism Review:
“According to a number of reports, the most recent ads push the message that protesters in Hong Kong are violent extremists and that state police are simply doing their best to keep the peace.”
Yes, Twitter takes money to promote the Chinese Communist Party line that pro-democracy protestors are violent extremists, a falsehood that does not count as “online misinformation” so far as Twitter is concerned, apparently.
Another coalition member is Microsoft, which, according to Business Insider, complies with China’s censorship laws. For example, earlier this year, when users in the United States tried to find images of Tank Man via Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, their searches yielded no results.
Readers may recall that Tank Man was the protestor who stood in front of Red Army tanks during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. He was being a “violent extremist,” I suppose. But Bing’s omission was merely the result of “human error,” according to reports on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
“Beijing is known to require search engines operating in its jurisdiction to censor results, but those restrictions are rarely applied elsewhere.”
The most important word in that sentence is “rarely.” Fans of Gilbert and Sulivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore may be recalling the Captain’s lines, “What, never? Well, hardly ever.”
Coincidentally, the BBC is another member of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. For readers unfamiliar with the BBC, it is Britain’s publicly-funded media organization that makes popular dramas, documentaries, and situation comedies and, once upon a time, used to be a trustworthy source of news, at least in comparison with, say, TASS or Pravda. It is also the organization that employed Martin Bashir, the reporter who secured a TV interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, by using faked bank statements that fueled the princess’s paranoid delusions that she was the victim of a conspiracy involving, inter alia, royal bodyguards; her husband and heir apparent to the Crown, Prince Charles; the Secret Intelligence Service; and GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the National Security Agency.
The BBC followed up on Bashir’s fakery with an equally fake internal inquiry and not only retained his services but gave him a promotion. For the report of the independent inquiry, click here.
In addition to Martin Bashir, the BBC employed Jimmy Savile who, during his lengthy broadcasting career, sexually assaulted approximately 72 people and raped several more, including an 8-year-old girl, crimes to which the BBC later admitted it had “turned a blind eye.”
So Twitter, Microsoft, and the BBC are now coalescing with other media corporations in order to protect us — poor, credulous, undiscerning, gullible us — against content manipulation and online misinformation. What, as they say, could possibly go wrong.
Federal question
During the hearing, the House chair of the committee suggested that deepfakes might be better dealt with via a new federal law. This brought to mind a current federal law, namely section 506 (c) of the Copyright Act, which makes it a crime to place on any work a false copyright notice:
“Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false… shall be fined not more than $2,500.”
This provision came to mind for two reasons. First, it was only last year that the Supreme Court of the United States issued its decision in Georgia, et al v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., on the subject of copyright in legislative works (the public edicts doctrine). The court reiterated the well-established point that legislators cannot claim copyright in the works they create in the course of their official duties.
That’s why Senator Ben Sasse has no grounds to go after State Representative Livingstone. And it is why the Massachusetts Legislature cannot claim copyright in the documents that it publishes. If it did so, e.g. by fraudulently posting a false copyright notice on its website, it would be violating section 506 (c) of the Copyright Act.
And that was the second reason that the provision came to mind as I watched the hearing, because right there on the screen, at the bottom of the page, appeared the following words:
I wonder if that qualifies as “online misinformation.”
From tort to crime
If we cannot safely place total trust in Twitter, Microsoft, the BBC, and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity as a whole (and we can’t), would we be any better off with Rep. Livingstone’s Act to Protect Against Deep Fakes Used to Facilitate Torturous or Criminal Conduct? No, and here’s why.
The proposed law would make it a crime to distribute a video in order to “facilitate criminal or tortious conduct” if the video was “created or altered in a manner that [it] would falsely appear to a reasonable observer to be an authentic record of the actual speech or conduct of an individual.”
The word “facilitate” is pretty clear, I suppose, and the term “criminal conduct” is easy enough to grasp. It covers things like assault and battery, and fraudulently placing a false copyright notice in violation of section 506 (c) of the Copyright Act.
But what qualifies as tortious conduct? We have torts aplenty in Massachusetts, but here are two that tend to come up in the context of online spats: defamation and the intentional infliction of emotional distress. To me, these are the two torts that seem likely to provide a pretext for political prosecutions under H. 1755, allowing Massachusetts politicians to use the courts to silence their opponents. Do such things really happen here? For just one example, see my post titled “Free speech wins (four years after judge bans candidate from mentioning opponent’s name.”
It can be difficult for public figures such as politicians to shut up their detractors with defamation lawsuits. They have to prove “actual malice,” i.e. that the speaker made a false statement knowing that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.
Easier, then, if you are an elected tribune of the people, to seek a civil harassment-prevention order, as did the politician in the case I discuss in the aforementioned post. Even easier, perhaps, to bring a private criminal complaint under the proposed Act to Protect Against Deep Fakes Used to Facilitate Torturous or Criminal Conduct or, better still, get your friend the prosecutor to ask a grand jury to issue an indictment.
If H. 1755 becomes law and you share a deepfake with the intent to cause emotional distress to, say, Senator Suehappy Thinskin you won’t be looking at your screen for a while; you’ll be looking at two and a half years in the slammer.
To safely forward the video of the esteemed Senator without fear of criminal prosecution, you would need to know — prior to sharing it — that it was not “created or altered in a manner that would falsely appear to a reasonable observer to be an authentic record of the actual speech or conduct of an individual.”
How could you be sure? Perhaps you could look for a certificate of authenticity issued by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. But the Coalition (i.e. Twitter, Microsoft, the BBC, etc.) might not issue certificates to videos that criticize the powerful. It might routinely withhold certificates from people who say things that the powerful do not like.
But the absence of a certificate would not necessarily mean that the video was deepfake. So you could roll the dice, share the video, and hope that you don’t get a call from the offended hack’s lawyer or from law enforcement.
Even if the video is authentic, you might worry that people with friends in high places might be able to persuade law enforcement — and even a judge and jury — that it is not. Readers may have noticed that when somebody says something true, but embarrassing, about a powerful person, the powerful person first denies it and then attacks the somebody who said it, often with the eager help of the online mob. Even if the truth of the statement eventually becomes apparent, by that point the speaker’s life has been turned upside down.
Yes, H. 1755 says that “no person shall be held liable under this section for any activity protected by the Massachusetts Constitution or by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.” But when do you, the speaker, find out whether your activity was protected by the Massachusetts Constitution or by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States? When a judge says so, i.e. long after you’ve been interrogated and prosecuted.
Those risks, I suspect, would make you think twice about forwarding the video of Senator Suehappy Thinskin saying or doing something idiotic. We call this the chilling effect.
But shouldn’t there be laws against using deepfakes to defame people or cause them emotional distress? Yes, and we already have them, e.g. the torts called defamation and the intentional infliction of emotional distress.
If you still think we need more criminal offenses for prosecutors to threaten people with, check out @ACrimeADay on Twitter. Spoiler alert: There are a lot.
Conclusion
Back in 2019, the Massachusetts bill to ban deepfakes had two cosponsors, but this time Representative Livingstone is going it alone. The bill is losing support rather than gaining it. You may think that I should take heart from this trend, but I do not. Why? Because of the difference between bad ideas and nuclear waste.
At some point, with the passage of time, nuclear waste stops being dangerous. Not so with bad ideas. You cannot summon forth the ideas that H. 1755 embodies, bottle them, bury them in a lead-lined underground vault, and wait for them to disintegrate into harmless nothingness. No, they remain in the atmosphere, floating freely like wraiths, sometimes for decades, until they suddenly make themselves manifest as emergency bills or outside sections in the State budget.
That is why I am no more relieved at the bill’s feeble prospects this session than I am about entrusting the task of identifying deepfakes to the likes of Twitter, Microsoft, and the BBC.
P.S. For the full text of Representative Jay Livingstone’s bill, H. 1755, scroll down below the image.
Photo by Kindel Media from Pexels
SECTION 1. Chapter 266 of the General Laws is hereby amended by inserting after section 37E the following section:-
Section 37E 1/2. (a)As used in this section, the following words shall have the following meaning unless the context clearly requires otherwise:
“Audiovisual record,” any audio or visual media in an electronic format and includes any photograph, motion-picture film, video recording, electronic image, or sound recording.
“Deep fake”, an audiovisual record created or altered in a manner that the record would falsely appear to a reasonable observer to be an authentic record of the actual speech or conduct of an individual.
(b) Whoever (1), creates, with the intent to distribute, a deep fake and with the intent that the distribution of the deep fake would facilitate criminal or tortious conduct, or (2) distributes an audiovisual record with actual knowledge that the audiovisual record is a deep fake and with the intent that the distribution of the audiovisual record would facilitate criminal or tortious conduct shall be guilty of the crime of identity fraud and shall be punished by a fine of not more than $5,000 or imprisonment in a house of correction for not more than two and one-half years, or by both such fine and imprisonment.
No person shall be held liable under this section for any activity protected by the Massachusetts Constitution or by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
May 19, 2020:- The Massachusetts eviction moratorium (Chapter 65) has several execrable features, and one of the worst is the abridgment of free speech. The speech in question is in the category that courts refer to as “commercial speech.” Should you care about State government violating people’s right to utter commercial speech? If you care about the non-commercial variety, yes.
Some, but not all, notices to quit
The statute — §3(a)(ii) to be precise — prohibits housing providers from sending “any notice, including a notice to quit, requesting, or demanding that a tenant of a residential dwelling unit vacate the premises” for non-payment of rent, for cause, or for no cause. However, the statute does permit notices to quit where a tenant’s criminal activity or lease violations “may impact the health or safety” of another person, including the general public.
So if a tenant is violating the lease in a way that “may impact the health or safety” of another, the housing provider is allowed to terminate the tenancy and issue a notice to quit (a prerequisite for most eviction proceedings, called “summary process” in Massachusetts). But if a tenant is simply not paying rent, the housing provider is not allowed to do so.
Before going any further, it is important to remember this key point: The law prohibits some, but not all, notices to quit.
Notices to quit are speech
A notice to quit is, literally, correspondence; a letter from one person to another. Both sender and recipient are parties to a contract, and the notice to quit is how the sender tells the recipient that the contract is at an end. It is a form of “expression related solely to the economic interests of the speaker and its audience” so constitutes commercial speech. Central Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp. v. Public Serv. Comm’n of N.Y., 447 U.S. 557, 561 (1980). The housing provider who sends the notice to quit is not evicting the tenant. Only a judge can do that by way of legal proceedings called summary process (see below).
Even though the notice to quit is commercial speech, which means that it gets less protection from the courts than non-commercial varieties, the government does not have free rein. If it wants to restrict someone’s commercial speech, the government still has to follow some rules.
To be constitutional, commercial-speech restrictions must be effective
The Supreme Judicial Court has held that “a restriction on commercial speech will not be upheld if it provides only ineffective or remote support for the government’s purpose.” Bulldog Inv’rs Gen. P’ship v. Sec’y of Com., 460 Mass. 647, 669–70 (2011) quoting Central Hudson, 447 U.S. at 564. If the restriction does not effectively support the government’s purpose, it is unconstitutional.
Does the ban on some notices to quit (but not others) effectively support the government’s purpose? And what is the government’s purpose, anyway?
The selective ban on notices to quit is ineffective
The express purpose of the Commonwealth, stated in the statute’s emergency preamble, is to establish “a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures during the Governor’s COVID 19 emergency declaration.” So for the duration of the emergency the government wants to temporarily stop evictions. Fair enough, some might say.
But evictions are not something housing providers can perform. Housing providers cannot evict anyone; only judges can do that. There are statutes that make this clear. G.L. c. 239 and c. 186.
If landlords try to evict, that is called self help, and it is illegal in Massachusetts. In fact, tenants’ advocates recommend that if a landlord resorts to self help the tenants should call the police and file a criminal complaint. Don’t believe me? Follow this link to the Massachusetts Legal Aid site and scroll down to the words in bold: Call the police and file a criminal complaint.
In order to impose a moratorium on evictions, the Commonwealth need only prohibit the courts from issuing judgments and executions for possession, which it has done by way of §3(b)(ii) which states that the courts must not “enter a judgment or default judgment for a plaintiff for possession of a residential dwelling unit… (iii) issue an execution for possession of a residential dwelling unit… ; (iv) deny, upon the request of a defendant, a stay of execution, or upon the request by a party, a continuance of a summary process case; or (v) schedule a court event, including a summary process trial.”
Courts are not allowed to hold summary process trials, enter judgment, award possession to housing providers, or deny tenants a stay of execution (execution means the eviction itself, where the sheriff forcibly removes the people and their belongings). That part of the statute, §3(b)(ii), is the one part that actually does establish a moratorium on evictions.
But only some evictions. Remember, Chapter 65 prohibits evictions for non-payment of rent and evictions where the housing provider does not specify a particular reason, so-called “no cause” evictions. It does not prohibit evictions where the tenant’s criminal activity or lease violations” may impact the health or safety” of another person or the general public.
How does evicting someone for criminal activity that may impact the safety of the general public (thereby rendering that dangerous person homeless) help keep the general public safe, whereas evicting someone for nonpayment of rent makes the general public less safe? That is a genuine question. I would like to know the Commonwealth’s answer.
Conclusion
The supposed goal of Chapter 65 is to establish a moratorium on evictions during the COVID 19 emergency. One part of the statute does exactly that (almost), by barring the courts from evicting people, except people who are potentially a danger to the public (putting them out on the street is OK, apparently). What does restricting the commercial speech rights of housing providers do to make the moratorium more effective? Nothing.
Chapter 65 is set to expire on August 18 unless the Governor exercises his option to extend it. Should he let it expire, or grant it an extension?
Exercise your speech rights while you can and let me know what you think.
May 12, 2020:- On May 8, 2020, Attorney General Maura Healey issued an “advisory” on residential evictions. An advisory is not a law or regulation, but it indicates how the Attorney General will interpret the law and try to persuade the courts to apply it. This particular advisory includes a novel interpretation of Chapter 65, the statute that limits the right of access to the courts for one class of people, namely housing providers (landlords).
The statute also abridges freedom of speech by banning landlords from sending notices to quit. In addition, by preventing property owners from obtaining possession even when tenants stop paying rent (whether for reasons related to COVID 19 or not) it operates as a taking. I have addressed those violations before and will do so again in future posts. This post is about access to justice, and how Attorney General Healey’s advisory (mis)interprets what the statute has to say about it.
Chapter 65
Chapter 65 allows housing providers to file for summary process only where a tenant’s criminal activity or lease violations “may impact the health or safety” of another person lawfully on the property or of the general public. But it bars housing providers from taking tenants to court for non-payment of rent. Under Chapter 65 (as opposed to the Declaration of Rights) no access to the courts is the rule, and the health/safety provision is the exception.
Statute in Derogation of Liberty
Chapter 65 takes away a fundamental liberty, namely access to the courts, which (as I have mentioned elsewhere) is one of the liberties guaranteed by the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights. Here in Massachusetts it is well established that statutes in derogation of liberty should be strictly construed and interpreted narrowly. They should be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling and legitimate government interest and strictly construed to comply with requirements of substantive due process, as the Supreme Judicial Court held in the Mattter of E.C., 479 Mass. 113 (2018).
In other words, if a statute takes away a basic right, the courts should interpret it narrowly so as to confine the damage to the individual’s liberty interest.
But Attorney General Healey says the opposite, that it is the fundamental right that should be narrowly construed, not the exception to it.
Editing out, and editing in
“Evictions can be brought only where a tenant (1) violates lease terms or engages in criminal activity, and (2) the violation may impact the health or safety of others who are lawfully on the premises. This exception is narrow and should only be used where there is a serious health or safety concern that can’t otherwise be addressed.”
That is what the advisory says about the statute. But that is not what the statute itself says. Not at all. First, the statutory language about impacts on health/safety applies not only to people lawfully on the premises but also to the general public. It says so right there in Section 1 of the statute:
“… may impact the health or safety of other residents, health care workers, emergency personnel, persons lawfully on the subject property or the general public.”
So in advising the general public, the Attorney General Healey left out that bit about the general public.
Second, if the Legislature had intended to say that housing providers may ask the courts to evict tenants only where the criminal activity or lease violations “are likely to seriously affect the health or safety of another person and cannot be addressed short of eviction” it would have said so. But it did not. Chapter 65 does not say “serious health or safety concerns” nor does it state that eviction must be the very last resort.
In addition to leaving out some words and adding others, the Attorney General’s interpretation is the opposite of the way to interpret a statute that derogates from liberty. The advisory says that the right of access to the courts that is the “narrow exception,” which is not what the appellate decisions say about statutes in derogation of liberty. On the contrary, according to precedent it is the liberty that should be construed broadly, and the exception to that liberty (in this case the barring of the courtroom doors for all but health/safety cases) that should be construed narrowly.
Conclusion
As if it were not bad enough that we have a statute that abridges freedom speech, bars access to the courts for one class of people, operates as an unconstitutional taking without reasonable compensation, and grants the Governor the option of extending its duration, now the Commonwealth’s chief law-enforcement official says that she will read into that statute words that are not there and apply it n a way that flies in the face of precedent.
So now you know the opinion of Attorney General Healey about your right of access to the courts. Should you wish to share your opinion with Attorney General Maura Healey, here is a link to the Contact page.
April 15, 2020:- Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse. If the Massachusetts Legislature passes the eviction moratorium embodied in this bill, which emerged from the Senate today, it will not only violate two of the bedrock rights that are guaranteed in the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, but will also grant to the Governor a power that no executive branch in the Anglosphere — no English monarch even — has claimed since the 17th Century: the power of suspending and dispensing the laws. This is a step backward, a step back to the era of royal absolutism.
It was already bad enough that our full-time salaried lawmakers wished to take private property without compensation and bar people from going to the courts. As I pointed out in a previous post, Article 10 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights guarantees reasonable compensation when the government takes property for public uses and Article 11 guarantees everyone the right to a remedy by recourse to the law and the right to obtain justice freely and promptly. Neither of those articles contains a carve-out for when the Governor declares an emergency.
Now the Legislature intends to strip away another right, one that the people of Massachusetts granted to their Legislature, namely the power to decide how long a statute should remain in force. Section 7 of the new bill says that the eviction moratorium will expire in 120 days unless the Governor extends it. Read that again. Unless the Governor extends it. The alleged power to suspend or dispense legislation was a medieval prerogative reclaimed in the 1640s by Charles I. Things went poorly from there, for both the king and the kingdom.
If this were simply a matter of the Legislature surrendering their own rights to the executive branch, it would merit little more than a meh. But the right is not theirs to give. The purpose behind the separation of powers is to protect the rights of the people, not the rights of their full-time salaried servants in the State House.
If Governor Baker signs this bill into law we will have crossed another constitutional threshold.
Must a charity that offers free reconstructive surgery to female victims of domestic violence also provide those services to a gay man? No, said the MCAD in a decision last September. Only two months earlier the Legislature and Governor had prohibited places of public accommodations from excluding men from women’s restrooms and locker rooms, so you might think the case would have grabbed the odd headline, but apart from this Mass Lawyers Weekly article it received surprisingly little media attention.
The respondent was the R.O.S.E (Regaining One’s Self Esteem) Fund, a non-profit that seeks to help women who are the survivors of domestic violence. In 2008 it declined to extend its services to Kevin Doran, whose male partner had assaulted him, leaving him with broken teeth and facial bones. With the support of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), Mr. Doran argued that the ROSE Fund is a place of public accommodation and that by turning him away it had violated the Massachusetts anti-discrimination laws.
In 2014 an MCAD hearing officer ruled in favor of the ROSE Fund, finding that the organization was not a place of public accommodation. In its appeal brief GLAD said the decision meant that “ROSE can now discriminate not only against men, but also on the basis of race, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and disability as well.”
Nevertheless the full three-member Commission upheld the 2014 decision on First Amendment grounds:
“The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized the venerable history of the public accommodation laws in Massachusetts, but when applied to expressive activity, the laws may not act to compel certain speech in violation of the First Amendment.”
For that reason, the Commission held that “a private charity set up with the express purpose of serving a narrow community may be allowed to make choices about whom to serve, based on the purpose of the organization and consistent selection criteria.”
This is a very narrow ruling. The MCAD limits its First Amendment expressive-activity exception to a thin sliver of entities: tax-exempt corporations set up to serve a “narrow community,” as opposed to regular businesses and individuals who do not have tax-exempt status and cater to the general public. The decision sits awkwardly alongside expressive-conduct cases from other jurisdictions such as Elane Photography (photographers fined for refusing to photograph same-sex commitment ceremony) and Barronnelle Stutzman (flower arranger fined for refusing to design arrangement for her friend’s same-sex wedding). In those cases, the fact that the defendants’ businesses consisted of expressive activity did not exempt them from the legal obligation to provide their services at same-sex weddings. If those are not examples of the state “compelling certain speech” I don’t know what is.
And as for why tax-exempt corporations should have greater free-speech rights than the rest of us, that is not something the MCAD’s Doran decision addresses.
October 28, 2016:- If you are one of the 139,000+ people employed by state or local government in Massachusetts, today’s decision about speech-rights at work might be of interest.
The case involves an erstwhile employee of the Worcester County Sheriff’s Office, Jude Cristo, who complained about a colleague’s use of official time and facilities while campaigning for Scott Bove, a candidate running for Sheriff (unsuccessfully, as it turned out). After the election the new Sheriff, Lew Evangelidis, fired Cristo, who brought an action under federal law for violation of his civil rights, namely his right to freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Cristo lost. The Appeals Court applied the federal test, which protects the speech of public employees only if they are speaking as citizens and not “pursuant to their official duties.” Cristo’s complaints were pursuant to his duties, said the Appeal Court.
But in a footnote, the court left open the possibility that public employees’ speech rights under the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights might be greater than under the First Amendment. If the speech that triggered the firing was whistle-blowing, the court hinted, then the fact that it was job-related whistle-blowing would not necessarily prove fatal. In other words, the employee might have a viable free-speech claim. Click here to read the case, Cristo v. Evangelidis. The footnote in question is number 6 on page 15.
As if they needed it this presidential-campaign season, here’s some good news for political consultants. The Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) is generating more business for them.
The latest state regulation aimed at controlling the funding of political speech means that candidate committees and independent expenditure political action committees (IE PACs) will face penalties if they share consultants. How will they likely avoid that? By employing separate consultants, of course.
Massachusetts law prohibits IE PACS from coordinating with candidate committees. But proving coordination can be difficult, so the regulations create presumptions that put the onus on the PACs and candidate committees to prove they did not coordinate. Readers with backgrounds in criminal law, constitutional law, high-school civics, or cop shows may be familiar with the presumption of innocence: These presumptions are not like that presumption.
Under the new state regulation, there will be a presumption that the IE PAC and the candidate committee are coordinating expenditures if they use the same “political, media, or legal consultant, or polling firm.” They can rebut the presumption, i.e. prove their innocence, by demonstrating that they adhered to a written firewall policy, the sort of document lawyers and political consultants are good at drafting. Those who would prefer to avoid any entanglements in the first place should bear in mind the words of Han Solo on the subject: “That’s the real trick, isn’t it. And it’s gonna cost you something extra.” An extra consultant, that is.
Another provision states that there will be a presumption of coordination if an IE PAC republishes in whole or in part “a communication relating to a candidate that is posted on the candidate’s Internet or social media site.” So no mere copying from now on. This rule should encourage even greater creativity (a billable quality) by requiring IE PAC consultants to make their clients’ communications look and sound distinct from those on the candidates’ site. Whoever said red tape stifles business?
Somewhere in the Caribbean, I suspect, there floats a yacht named OCPF.
Peter Vickery, Esq., 