Crossover Sensation Neil Gorsuch

Justice Gorsuch joins the four liberals in Sessions v. Dimaya, applying the void-for-vagueness doctrine to a particular deportation law.

Today's Supreme Court decision in Sessions v. Dimaya had to decide whether a particular deportation statute was vague: That statute generally provided that even a lawful permanent resident alien must be deported if he committed various crimes, some of which were specifically listed and some of which were covered by a catchall "crime of violence" category—defined as "any other offense that is a felony and that, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense."

In 2015, the Supreme Court decided Johnson v. United States, in which the Court held that a very similar criminal mandatory minimum sentence statute was void for vagueness—and today, the four liberal Justices plus Justice Gorsuch held the same as to the deportation statute. Here is the meat of Justice Gorsuch's opinion, which I think says a lot about his view of constitutional judging generally, of originalism, and of the void-for-vagueness doctrine in particular (many citations omitted and paragraph breaks added):

Vague laws invite arbitrary power. Before the Revolution, the crime of treason in English law was so capaciously construed that the mere expression of disfavored opinions could invite transportation or death. The founders cited the crown's abuse of "pretended" crimes like this as one of their reasons for revolution. Today's vague laws may not be as invidious, but they can invite the exercise of arbitrary power all the same—by leaving the people in the dark about what the law demands and allowing prosecutors and courts to make it up.

The law before us today is such a law. Before holding a lawful permanent resident alien like James Dimaya subject to removal for having committed a crime, the Immigration and Nationality Act requires a judge to determine that the ordinary case of the alien's crime of conviction involves a substantial risk that physical force may be used. But what does that mean? Just take the crime at issue in this case, California burglary, which applies to everyone from armed home intruders to door-to-door salesmen peddling shady products. How, on that vast spectrum, is anyone supposed to locate the ordinary case and say whether it includes a substantial risk of physical force? The truth is, no one knows. The law's silence leaves judges to their intuitions and the people to their fate. In my judgment, the Constitution demands more.

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I begin with a foundational question. Writing for the Court in Johnson v. United States (2015), Justice Scalia held the residual clause of the Armed Career Criminal Act void for vagueness because it invited "more unpredictability and arbitrariness" than the Constitution allows. Because the residual clause in the statute now before us uses almost exactly the same language as the residual clause in Johnson, respect for precedent alone would seem to suggest that both clauses should suffer the same judgment.

But first in Johnson and now again today Justice Thomas has questioned whether our vagueness doctrine can fairly claim roots in the Constitution as originally understood. For its part, the Court has yet to offer a reply. I believe our colleague's challenge is a serious and thoughtful one that merits careful attention. At day's end, though, it is a challenge to which I find myself unable to subscribe. Respectfully, I am persuaded instead that void for vagueness doctrine, at least properly conceived, serves as a faithful expression of ancient due process and separation of powers principles the framers recognized as vital to ordered liberty under our Constitution.

Consider first the doctrine's due process underpinnings. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee that "life, liberty, or property" may not be taken "without due process of law." That means the government generally may not deprive a person of those rights without affording him the benefit of (at least) those "customary procedures to which freemen were entitled by the old law of England." Pacific Mut. Life Ins. Co. v. Haslip (1991) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment) (internal quotation marks omitted).

Admittedly, some have suggested that the Due Process Clause does less work than this, allowing the government to deprive people of their liberty through whatever procedures (or lack of them) the government's current laws may tolerate. But in my view the weight of the historical evidence shows that the clause sought to ensure that the people's rights are never any less secure against governmental invasion than they were at common law. Lord Coke took this view of the English due process guarantee. John Rutledge, our second Chief Justice, explained that Coke's teachings were carefully studied and widely adopted by the framers, becoming "'almost the foundations of our law.'" And many more students of the Constitution besides—from Justice Story to Justice Scalia—have agreed that this view best represents the original under­ standing of our own Due Process Clause.

Perhaps the most basic of due process's customary protections is the demand of fair notice. Criminal indictments at common law had to provide "precise and sufficient certainty" about the charges involved. 4 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 301 (1769) (Blackstone). Unless an "offence [was] set forth with clearness and certainty," the indict­ ment risked being held void in court. See also 2 W. Hawkins, Pleas of the Crown, ch. 25, §§99, 100, pp. 244–245 (2d ed. 1726) ("[I]t seems to have been anciently the common practice, where an indictment appeared to be [in]sufficient, either for its uncertainty or the want of proper legal words, not to put the defendant to answer it").

The same held true in civil cases affecting a person's life, liberty, or property. A civil suit began by obtaining a writ—a detailed and specific form of action asking for particular relief. Because the various civil writs were clearly defined, English subjects served with one would know with particularity what legal requirement they were alleged to have violated and, accordingly, what would be at issue in court. And a writ risked being held defective if it didn't provide fair notice. Goldington v. Bassingburn, Y. B. Trin. 3 Edw. II, f. 27b (1310) (explaining that it was "the law of the land" that "no one [could] be taken by surprise" by having to "answer in court for what [one] has not been warned to answer").

The requirement of fair notice applied to statutes too. Blackstone illustrated the point with a case involving a statute that made "stealing sheep, or other cattle" a felony. 1 Blackstone 88 (emphasis deleted). Because the term "cattle" embraced a good deal more then than it does now (including wild animals, no less), the court held the statute failed to provide adequate notice about what it did and did not cover—and so the court treated the term "cattle" as a nullity. All of which, Blackstone added, had the salutary effect of inducing the legislature to reenter the field and make itself clear by passing a new law extending the statute to "bulls, cows, oxen," and more "by name."

This tradition of courts refusing to apply vague statutes finds parallels in early American practice as well. [Examples omitted.-EV] …

What history suggests, the structure of the Constitution confirms. Many of the Constitution's other provisions presuppose and depend on the existence of reasonably clear laws. Take the Fourth Amendment's requirement that arrest warrants must be supported by probable cause, and consider what would be left of that requirement if the alleged crime had no meaningful boundaries. Or take the Sixth Amendment's mandate that a defendant must be informed of the accusations against him and allowed to bring witnesses in his defense, and consider what use those rights would be if the charged crime was so vague the defendant couldn't tell what he's alleged to have done and what sort of witnesses he might need to rebut that charge. Without an assurance that the laws supply fair notice, so much else of the Constitution risks becoming only a "parchment barrie[r]" against arbitrary power. The Federalist No. 48, p. 308 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961) (J. Madison).

Although today's vagueness doctrine owes much to the guarantee of fair notice embodied in the Due Process Clause, it would be a mistake to overlook the doctrine's equal debt to the separation of powers. The Constitution assigns "[a]ll legislative Powers" in our federal government to Congress. Art. I, §1. It is for the people, through their elected representatives, to choose the rules that will govern their future conduct. See The Federalist No. 78, at 465 (A. Hamilton) ("The legislature … prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated"). Meanwhile, the Constitution assigns to judges the "judicial Power" to decide "Cases" and "Controversies." Art. III, §2. That power does not license judges to craft new laws to govern future conduct, but only to "discer[n] the course prescribed by law" as it currently exists and to "follow it" in resolving disputes between the people over past events.

From this division of duties, it comes clear that legislators may not "abdicate their responsibilities for setting the standards of the criminal law," by leaving to judges the power to decide "the various crimes includable in [a] vague phrase." For "if the legislature could set a net large enough to catch all possible offenders, and leave it to the courts to step inside and say who could be rightfully de­ tained, and who should be set at large[,] [t]his would, to some extent, substitute the judicial for the legislative department of government." Nor is the worry only that vague laws risk allowing judges to assume legislative power. Vague laws also threaten to transfer legislative power to police and prosecutors, leaving to them the job of shaping a vague statute's contours through their enforcement decisions.

These structural worries are more than just formal ones. Under the Constitution, the adoption of new laws restricting liberty is supposed to be a hard business, the product of an open and public debate among a large and diverse number of elected representatives. Allowing the legislature to hand off the job of lawmaking risks substituting this design for one where legislation is made easy, with a mere handful of unelected judges and prosecutors free to "condem[n] all that [they] personally disapprove and for no better reason than [they] disapprove it."

Nor do judges and prosecutors act in the open and accountable forum of a legislature, but in the comparatively obscure confines of cases and controversies. For just these reasons, Hamilton warned, while "liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone," it has "every thing to fear from" the union of the judicial and legislative powers. No doubt, too, for reasons like these this Court has held "that the moreimportant aspect of vagueness doctrine 'is not actual notice, but … the requirement that a legislature establish minimal guidelines to govern law enforcement'" and keep the separate branches within their proper spheres.

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Persuaded that vagueness doctrine enjoys a secure footing in the original understanding of the Constitution, the next question I confront concerns the standard of review. What degree of imprecision should this Court tolerate in a statute before declaring it unconstitutionally vague? For its part, the government argues that where (as here) a person faces only civil, not criminal, consequences from a statute's operation, we should declare the law unconstitutional only if it is "unintelligible." But in the criminal context this Court has generally insisted that the law must afford "ordinary people … fair notice of the conduct it punishes."

And I cannot see how the Due Process Clause might often require any less than that in the civil context either. Fair notice of the law's demands, as we've seen, is "the first essential of due process." And as we've seen, too, the Constitution sought to preserve a common law tradition that usually aimed to en­ sure fair notice before any deprivation of life, liberty, or property could take place, whether under the banner of the criminal or the civil law.

First principles aside, the government suggests that at least this Court's precedents support adopting a less-than­fair-notice standard for civil cases. But even that much I do not see. This Court has already expressly held that a "stringent vagueness test" should apply to at least some civil laws—those abridging basic First Amendment freedoms. This Court has made clear, too, that due process protections against vague laws are "not to be avoided by the simple label a State chooses to fasten upon its conduct or its statute." So the happenstance that a law is found in the civil or criminal part of the statute books cannot be dispositive.

To be sure, this Court has also said that what qualifies as fair notice depends "in part on the nature of the enactment." And the Court has sometimes "expressed greater tolerance of enactments with civil rather than criminal penalties because the consequences of imprecision are qualitatively less severe." But to acknowledge these truisms does nothing to prove that civil laws must always be subject to the government's emaciated form of review.

In fact, if the severity of the consequences counts when deciding the standard of review, shouldn't we also take account of the fact that today's civil laws regularly impose penalties far more severe than those found in many criminal statutes? Ours is a world filled with more and more civil laws bearing more and more extravagant punishments.

Today's "civil" penalties include confiscatory rather than compensatory fines, forfeiture provisions that allow homes to be taken, remedies that strip persons of their professional licenses and livelihoods, and the power to commit persons against their will indefinitely. Some of these penalties are routinely imposed and are routinely graver than those associated with misdemeanor crimes— and often harsher than the punishment for felonies.

And not only are "punitive civil sanctions … rapidly expanding," they are "sometimes more severely punitive than the parallel criminal sanctions for the same conduct." Given all this, any suggestion that criminal cases warrant a heightened standard of review does more to persuade me that the criminal standard should be set above our precedent's current threshold than to suggest the civil standard should be buried below it.

Retreating to a more modest line of argument, the government emphasizes that this case arises in the immigration context and so implicates matters of foreign relations where the Executive enjoys considerable constitutional authority. But to acknowledge that the President has broad authority to act in this general area supplies no justification for allowing judges to give content to an impermissibly vague law.

Alternatively still, Justice Thomas suggests that, at least at the time of the founding, aliens present in this country may not have been understood as possessing any rights under the Due Process Clause. For support, he points to the Alien Friends Act of 1798. But the Alien Friends Act—better known as the "Alien" part of the Alien and Sedition Acts—is one of the most notorious laws in our country's history. It was understood as a temporary war measure, not one that the legislature would endorse in a time of tranquility. Yet even then it was widely condemned as unconstitutional by Madison and many others. It also went unenforced, may have cost the Federalist Party its existence, and lapsed a mere two years after its enactment. With this fuller view, it seems doubtful the Act tells us a great deal about aliens' due process rights at the founding.

Besides, none of this much matters. Whether Madison or his adversaries had the better of the debate over the constitutionality of the Alien Friends Act, Congress is surely free to extend existing forms of liberty to new classes of persons—liberty that the government may then take only after affording due process. Madison made this very point, suggesting an alien's admission in this country could in some circumstances be analogous to "the grant of land to an individual," which "may be of favor not of right; but the moment the grant is made, the favor becomes a right, and must be forfeited before it can be taken away." And, of course, that's exactly what Congress eventually chose to do here. Decades ago, it enacted a law affording Mr. Dimaya lawful permanent residency in this country, extending to him a statutory liberty interest others traditionally have enjoyed to remain in and move about the country free from physical imprisonment and restraint.

Today, a plurality of the Court agrees that we should reject the government's plea for a feeble standard of review, but for a different reason. My colleagues suggest the law before us should be assessed under the fair notice standard because of the special gravity of its civil deportation penalty. But, grave as that penalty may be, I cannot see why we would single it out for special treatment when (again) so many civil laws today impose so many similarly severe sanctions. Why, for example, would due process require Congress to speak more clearly when it seeks to deport a lawfully resident alien than when it wishes to subject a citizen to indefinite civil commitment, strip him of a business license essential to his family's living, or confiscate his home? I can think of no good answer.

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With the fair notice standard now in hand, all that remains is to ask how it applies to the case before us. And here at least the answer comes readily for me: to the extent it requires an "ordinary case" analysis, the portion of the Immigration and Nationality Act before us fails the fair notice test for the reasons Justice Scalia identified in Johnson and the Court recounts today.

Just like the statute in Johnson, the statute here instructs courts to impose special penalties on individuals previously "convicted of" a "crime of violence." Just like the statute in Johnson, the statute here fails to specify which crimes qualify for that label. Instead, and again like the statute in Johnson, the statute here seems to require a judge to guess about the ordinary case of the crime of conviction and then guess whether a "substantial risk" of "physical force" attends its commission. Johnson held that a law that asks so much of courts while offering them so little by way of guidance is unconstitutionally vague. And I do not see how we might reach a different judgment here.

Any lingering doubt is resolved for me by taking account of just some of the questions judges trying to apply the statute using an ordinary case analysis would have to confront. Does a conviction for witness tampering ordinarily involve a threat to the kneecaps or just the promise of a bribe? Does a conviction for kidnapping ordinarily involve throwing someone into a car trunk or a noncustodial parent picking up a child from daycare?

These questions do not suggest obvious answers. Is the court supposed to hold evidentiary hearings to sort them out, entertaining experts with competing narratives and statistics, before deciding what the ordinary case of a given crime looks like and how much risk of violence it poses? What is the judge to do if there aren't any reliable statistics available?

Should (or must) the judge predict the effects of new technology on what qualifies as the ordinary case? After all, surely the risk of injury calculus for crimes like larceny can be expected to change as more thefts are committed by computer rather than by gunpoint. Or instead of requiring real evidence, does the statute mean to just leave it all to a judicial hunch? And on top of all that may be the most difficult question yet: at what level of generality is the inquiry supposed to take place? Is a court supposed to pass on the ordinary case of burglary in the relevant neighborhood or county, or should it focus on statewide or even national experience? How is a judge to know? How are the people to know?

The implacable fact is that this isn't your everyday ambiguous statute. It leaves the people to guess about what the law demands—and leaves judges to make it up. You cannot discern answers to any of the questions this law begets by resorting to the traditional canons of statutory interpretation. No amount of staring at the statute's text, structure, or history will yield a clue. Nor does the statute call for the application of some preexisting body of law familiar to the judicial power. The statute doesn't even ask for application of common experience. Choice, pure and raw, is required. Will, not judgment, dictates the result….

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Having said this much, it is important to acknowledge some limits on today's holding too…. Vagueness doctrine represents a procedural, not a substantive, demand. It does not forbid the legislature from acting toward any end it wishes, but only requires it to act with enough clarity that reasonable people can know what is required of them and judges can apply the law consistent with their limited office. Our history surely bears examples of the judicial misuse of the so-called "substantive component" of due process to dictate policy on matters that belonged to the people to decide. But concerns with substantive due process should not lead us to react by withdrawing an ancient procedural protection compelled by the original meaning of the Constitution.

Today's decision sweeps narrowly in yet one more way. By any fair estimate, Congress has largely satisfied the procedural demand of fair notice even in the INA provision before us. The statute lists a number of specific crimes that can lead to a lawful resident's removal—for example, murder, rape, and sexual abuse of a minor. Our ruling today does not touch this list. We address only the statute's "residual clause" where Congress ended its own list and asked us to begin writing our own.

Just as Blackstone's legislature passed a revised statute clarifying that "cattle" covers bulls and oxen, Congress remains free at any time to add more crimes to its list. It remains free, as well, to write a new residual clause that affords the fair notice lacking here. Congress might, for example, say that a conviction for any felony carrying a prison sentence of a specified length opens an alien to removal. Congress has done almost exactly this in other laws. What was done there could be done here.

But those laws are not this law. And while the statute before us doesn't rise to the level of threatening death for "pretended offences" of treason, no one should be surprised that the Constitution looks unkindly on any law so vague that reasonable people cannot understand its terms and judges do not know where to begin in applying it. A government of laws and not of men can never tolerate that arbitrary power. And, in my judgment, that foundational principle dictates today's result….

Hat tip to John Elwood, who I think coined the "Crossover Sensation, Justice __" line (originally, said about Justice Breyer).