569 U.S. 221 | SCOTUS | 2013
Lead Opinion
*224In this case, we must decide whether the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, Va.Code Ann. § 2.2-3700 et seq. , violates either the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV of the Constitution or the dormant Commerce Clause. The Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), provides that "all public records shall be open to inspection and copying by any citizens of the Commonwealth," but it grants no such right to non-Virginians. § 2.2-3704(A) (Lexis 2011).
Petitioners, who are citizens of other States, unsuccessfully sought information under the Act and then brought this constitutional challenge. We hold, however, that petitioners' constitutional rights were not violated. By means other than the state FOIA, Virginia made available to petitioners most of the information that they sought, and the Commonwealth's refusal to furnish the additional information did not abridge any constitutionally protected privilege or immunity. Nor did Virginia violate the dormant Commerce Clause. The state Freedom of Information Act does not regulate commerce in any meaningful sense, but instead provides a service that is related to state citizenship. For these reasons, we affirm the decision of the Court of Appeals rejecting petitioners' constitutional claims.
I
Petitioners Mark J. McBurney and Roger W. Hurlbert are citizens of Rhode Island and California respectively. McBurney and Hurlbert each requested documents under the Virginia FOIA, but their requests were denied because of their citizenship.
McBurney is a former resident of Virginia whose ex-wife is a Virginia citizen. After his ex-wife defaulted on her child support obligations, McBurney asked the Commonwealth's *225Division of Child Support Enforcement to file a petition for child support on his behalf. The agency complied, but only after a 9-month delay. McBurney attributes that delay to agency error and says that it cost him nine months of child support. To ascertain the reason for the agency's delay, McBurney *1714filed a Virginia FOIA request seeking "all emails, notes, files, memos, reports, letters, policies, [and] opinions" pertaining to his family, along with all documents "regarding [his] application for child support" and all documents pertaining to the handling of child support claims like his. App. in No. 11-1099(CA4), p. 39A. The agency denied McBurney's request on the ground that he was not a Virginia citizen. McBurney later requested the same documents under Virginia's Government Data Collection and Dissemination Practices Act, Va.Code Ann. § 2.2-3800 et seq. , and through that request he received most of the information he had sought that pertained specifically to his own case. He did not, however, receive any general policy information about how the agency handled claims like his.
Hurlbert is the sole proprietor of Sage Information Services, a business that requests real estate tax records on clients' behalf from state and local governments across the United States. In 2008, Hurlbert was hired by a land/title company to obtain real estate tax records for properties in Henrico County, Virginia. He filed a Virginia FOIA request for the documents with the Henrico County Real Estate Assessor's Office, but his request was denied because he was not a Virginia citizen.
Petitioners filed suit under
*226Like Virginia, several other States have enacted freedom of information laws that are available only to their citizens. See, e.g., Ala.Code § 36-12-40 (2012 Cum.Supp.); Ark.Code Ann. § 25-19-105 (2011 Supp.); Del.Code Ann., Tit. 29, § 10003 (2012 Supp.); Mo.Rev.Stat. § 109.180 (2012) ; N.H.Rev.Stat. Ann. § 91-A:4 (West 2012) ;
II
Under the Privileges and Immunities Clause, "[t]he Citizens of each State [are] entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States." U.S. Const., Art. IV, § 2, cl. 1. We have said that "[t]he object of the Privileges and Immunities Clause is to 'strongly ... constitute the citizens of the United States [as] one people,' by 'plac[ing] the citizens of each State upon the same footing with citizens of other States, so far as the advantages resulting from citizenship in those States are concerned.' " Lunding v. New York Tax Appeals Tribunal,
*1715See, e.g.,
Petitioners allege that Virginia's citizens-only FOIA provision violates four different "fundamental" privileges or immunities: the opportunity to pursue a common calling, the *227ability to own and transfer property, access to the Virginia courts, and access to public information. The first three items on that list, however, are not abridged by the Virginia FOIA, and the fourth-framed broadly-is not protected by the Privileges and Immunities Clause.
A
Hurlbert argues that Virginia's citizens-only FOIA provision abridges his ability to earn a living in his chosen profession, namely, obtaining property records from state and local governments on behalf of clients. He is correct that the Privileges and Immunities Clause protects the right of citizens to "ply their trade, practice their occupation, or pursue a common calling." Hicklin v. Orbeck,
Virginia's FOIA differs sharply from those statutes. By its own terms, Virginia's FOIA was enacted to "ensur[e] the people of the Commonwealth ready access to public records in the custody of a public body or its officers and employees, and free entry to meetings of public bodies wherein the business of the people is being conducted." Va.Code Ann. § 2.2-3700(B) (Lexis 2011). Hurlbert does not allege-and has offered no proof-that the challenged provision of the Virginia FOIA was enacted in order to provide a competitive economic advantage for Virginia citizens. Cf. Hillside Dairy Inc. v. Lyons,
B
Hurlbert next alleges that the challenged provision of the Virginia FOIA abridges the right to own and transfer property in the Commonwealth. Like the right to pursue a common calling, the right to "take, hold and dispose of property, either real or personal," has long been seen as one of the privileges of citizenship. See Corfield v. Coryell,
Virginia, however, does not prevent citizens of other States from obtaining such documents. Under Virginia law, "any records and papers of every circuit court that are maintained by the clerk of the circuit court shall be open to inspection by any person and the clerk shall, when requested, furnish copies thereof."
*230Va.Code Ann. § 17.1-208 (Lexis 2010). Such records and papers include records of property transfers, like title documents, § 55 - 106 (LEXIS 2012); notices of federal tax liens and other federal liens against property, § 55-142.1 ; notices of state tax liens against property, § 58.1-314 (Lexis 2009) (state taxes generally), § 58.1-908 (estate tax liens), § 58.1-1805 (state taxes generally), § 58.1-2021(A) (liens filed by agencies other than the Tax Commission); and notice of mortgages and other encumbrances, § 8.01-241 (Lexis Supp. 2012).
A similar flaw undermines Hurlbert's claim that Virginia violates the Privileges and Immunities Clause by preventing citizens of other States from accessing real estate tax assessment records. It is true that those records, while available to Virginia citizens under the state FOIA, are not required by statute to be made available to noncitizens. See *1717Associated Tax Service, Inc. v. Fitzpatrick,
C
McBurney alleges that Virginia's citizens-only FOIA provision impermissibly burdens his "access to public proceedings." Brief for Petitioners 42. McBurney is correct that the Privileges and Immunities Clause "secures citizens of one State the right to resort to the courts of another, equally with the citizens of the latter State." Missouri Pacific R. Co. v. Clarendon Boat Oar Co.,
The Privileges and Immunities Clause does not require States to erase any distinction between citizens and non-citizens that might conceivably give state citizens some detectable litigation advantage. Rather, the Court has made clear that "the constitutional requirement is satisfied if the non-resident is given access to the courts of the State upon terms which in themselves are reasonable and adequate for the enforcing of any rights he may have, even though they may not be technically and precisely the same in extent as those accorded to resident citizens." Canadian Northern R. Co. v. Eggen,
The challenged provision of the Virginia FOIA clearly does not deprive noncitizens of "reasonable and adequate" access to the Commonwealth's courts. Virginia's rules of civil procedure provide for both discovery, Va. Sup.Ct. Rule 4:1 (2012), and subpoenas duces tecum, Rule 4:9. There is no reason to think that those mechanisms are insufficient to provide noncitizens with any relevant, nonprivileged documents needed in litigation.
*232Moreover, Virginia law gives citizens and noncitizens alike access to judicial records. Va.Code Ann. § 17.1-208 ; see also Shenandoah Publishing House, Inc. v. Fanning,
McBurney's own case is illustrative. When his FOIA request was denied, McBurney was told that he should request the materials he sought pursuant to the Government Data Collection and Dissemination Practices Act. Upon placing a request under that Act, he ultimately received much of what he sought. Accordingly, Virginia's citizens-only FOIA provision does not impermissibly burden noncitizens' ability to access the Commonwealth's courts.
D
Finally, we reject petitioners' sweeping claim that the challenged provision of the Virginia FOIA violates the Privileges and Immunities Clause because it denies them the right to access public information on equal terms with citizens of the Commonwealth. We cannot agree that the Privileges and Immunities Clause covers this broad right.
This Court has repeatedly made clear that there is no constitutional right to obtain all the information provided by FOIA laws. See Houchins v. KQED, Inc.,
*233It certainly cannot be said that such a broad right has "at all times, been enjoyed by the citizens of the several states which compose this Union, from the time of their becoming free, independent, and sovereign." Corfield,
Nineteenth-century American cases, while less uniform, certainly do not support the proposition that a broad-based right to access public information was widely recognized in the early Republic. See, e.g., Cormack v. Wolcott,
Nor is such a sweeping right "basic to the maintenance or well-being of the Union." Baldwin,
III
In addition to his Privileges and Immunities Clause claim, Hurlbert contends that Virginia's citizens-only FOIA provision violates the dormant Commerce Clause. The Commerce Clause empowers Congress "[t]o regulate Commerce ... among the several States." Art. I, § 8, cl. 3. The Commerce Clause does not expressly impose any constraints on "the several States," and several Members of the Court have expressed the view that it does not do so. See General Motors Corp. v. Tracy,
Our dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence "significantly limits the ability of States and localities to regulate or otherwise burden the flow of interstate commerce." Maine v. Taylor,
Virginia's FOIA law neither "regulates" nor "burdens" interstate commerce; rather, it merely provides a service to local citizens that would not otherwise be available at all. The "common thread" among those cases in which the Court has found a dormant Commerce Clause violation is that "the State interfered with the natural functioning of the interstate market either through prohibition or through burdensome regulation." Hughes v. Alexandria Scrap Corp.,
Even shoehorned into our dormant Commerce Clause framework, however, Hurlbert's claim would fail. Insofar as there is a "market" for public documents in Virginia, it is a market for a product that the Commonwealth has created and of which the Commonwealth is the sole manufacturer. We have held that a State does not violate the dormant Commerce Clause when, having created a market through a state program, it "limits benefits generated by [that] state program to those who fund the state treasury and whom the State was created to serve." Reeves, Inc. v. Stake,
*237For these reasons, Virginia's citizens-only FOIA provision does not violate the dormant Commerce Clause.
* * *
Because Virginia's citizens-only FOIA provision neither abridges any of petitioners' fundamental privileges and immunities nor impermissibly regulates commerce, petitioners' constitutional claims fail. The judgment below is affirmed.
It is so ordered.
At oral argument, the Solicitor General of Virginia contended that, as a matter of Virginia law, Hurlbert "is entitled to the tax assessment data in the clerk's office." Tr. of Oral Arg. 38. Neither at oral argument nor in its briefs did Virginia cite any Virginia statute providing that real estate tax assessment records be filed in the clerk's office. Virginia Code Ann. § 58.1-3300 (Lexis 2009), which directs that "reassessment" records be filed with the clerk, may be the statute to which counsel referred, but without an official construction of the statute by Virginia's Supreme Court-and, in light of the fact that petitioners have not been afforded an opportunity to rebut its importance-we do not rely upon it here.
See http://www.co.henrico.va.us/finance/disclaimer.html (as visited April 26, 2013, and available in Clerk of Court's case file).
Concurrence Opinion
I join the Court's opinion. Though the Court has properly applied our dormant Commerce Clause precedents, I continue *1721to adhere to my view that "[t]he negative Commerce Clause has no basis in the text of the Constitution, makes little sense, and has proved virtually unworkable in application, and, consequently, cannot serve as a basis for striking down a state statute." Hillside Dairy Inc. v. Lyons,