Overcoming Overbreadth: Facial Challenges and the Valid Rule Requirement

American University Law Review Volume 48 | Issue 2 Article 2 1998 Overcoming Overbreadth: Facial Challenges and the Valid Rule Requirement Marc E. Isserles Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/aulr Part of the Constitutional Law Commons Recommended Citation Isserles, Marc E. “Overcoming Overbreadth: Facial Challenges and the Valid Rule Requirement.” American University Law Review 48, no.2 (December, 1998): 359-464. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Washington College of Law Journals & Law Reviews at Digital Commons @ American University Washington College of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in American University Law Review by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ American University Washington College of Law. For more information, please contact . Overcoming Overbreadth: Facial Challenges and the Valid Rule Requirement Keywords United States v. Salerno, Supreme Court, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, First Amendment This article is available in American University Law Review: http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/aulr/vol48/iss2/2 OVERCOMING OVERBREADTH: FACIAL CHALLENGES AND THE VALID RULE REQUIREMENT MARC E. ISSERLES∗ TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ........................................................................................ 360 I. “Overbreadth Facial Challenges” and the As-Applied Regime........................................................................................... 365 II. Salerno’s “No Set of Circumstances” Facial Challenge Test: The Prevailing Interpretation .................................................. 371 A. The Critique of Salerno ...................................................... 371 B. The Overbreadth Assumption .......................................... 375 C. Abandoning the Overbreadth Assumption ...................... 382 III. Reconsidering Salerno’s “No Set of Circumstances”................ 385 A. Valid Rule Facial Challenges Explained........................... 386 1. A summary sketch ........................................................ 386 2. The First Amendment: Two forms of facial challenges ............................................................................ 388 B. Reinterpreting Salerno as a Descriptive Claim About a Statute Whose Terms State an Invalid Rule of Law ......... 395 1. Salerno is consistent with the rules of the as-applied regime........................................................................... 396 2. Salerno’s “no set of circumstances” was not unnecessary dictum ................................................................ 397 3. Salerno is consistent with the Supreme Court’s past facial challenge practice .............................................. 409 4. Salerno is not draconian nor does it unjustifiably privilege First Amendment challengers ...................... 415 C. The Limits of Valid Rule Theory: Overbreadth Doctrine and the Narrow Tailoring Requirement.................. 416 ∗ J.D., 1998, Harvard Law School. Special thanks to Richard Fallon, whose guidance and insight truly made this Article possible. Thanks also to Michael Dorf and Henry Monaghan for reading the manuscript and offering helpful comments and criticisms. Finally, thanks to Anne Harkavy, Kimo Peluso, and Joshua Waldman for their thoughtful suggestions, constant dialogue, and encouragement. 359 IV. The Preconditions for a Successful Valid Rule Facial Challenge.......................................................................................... 421 A. Identifying an Invalid Rule of Law.................................... 423 1. The litigant’s facial challenge must fairly be identified as a valid rule facial challenge.............................. 425 2. The statutory terms themselves must trigger constitutional scrutiny under the applicable doctrinal test................................................................................. 428 3. The doctrinal test triggered must analyze the constitutional validity of the statutory terms and not the validity of specific statutory applications .............. 438 a. Some straightforward doctrinal tests ..................... 440 b. Harder doctrinal tests............................................. 443 B. The Preconditions and the Question of Remedy ............ 451 Conclusion: A Proposal...................................................................... 456 INTRODUCTION Litigants in the federal courts can attack the constitutionality of legislative enactments in two ways: they can bring a facial challenge to the law, alleging that it is unconstitutional in all of its applications, or they can bring an as-applied challenge, alleging that the law is unconstitutional as applied to the particular facts that their case presents.1 Although the rhetoric of “nullification” (i.e., that a facially invalid statute is null and void) continues to accentuate artificially the differences between facial and as-applied challenges,2 the differences 1. See Michael C. Dorf, Facial Challenges to State and Federal Statutes, 46 STAN. L. REV. 235, 236 (1994). 2. See Ada v. Guam Soc’y of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, 506 U.S. 1011, 1012 (1992) (Scalia, J., dissenting from denial of cert.) (stating that a court’s holding that a statute is facially unconstitutional renders the statute “utterly inoperative”); John Christopher Ford, The Casey Standard for Evaluating Facial Attacks on Abortion Statutes, 95 MICH. L. REV. 1443, 1444 (1997) (“Successful facial challenges, in short, nullify a state law.”). As others have remarked, statements invoking the concept of nullification are somewhat exaggerated, given that state officials need only obtain a narrowing construction from a state court to continue enforcing a state statute that the Supreme Court has held facially unconstitutional. See Richard H. Fallon, Jr., Making Sense of Overbreadth, 100 YALE L.J. 853, 854 (1991) (remarking that the vocabulary of “voidness” and similar terms do more to mislead than to describe); see also Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U.S. 103, 115-16 (1990) (noting the possibility of a narrow construction of the statute). But see Matthew D. Adler, Rights Against Rules: The Moral Structure of American Constitutional Law, 97 MICH. L. REV. 1, 149-50 (1998) (arguing for a more robust notion of facial invalidation). A lower federal court’s ruling that a state statute is facially unconstitutional has even less effect on the state’s power to enforce its own statutes because the coordinate relationship between state and lower federal courts dictates that a federal court’s ruling extends only to the parties before the court. See Fallon, supra, at 853-54 & nn.5-6. On the other hand, to the extent that state officials do not often seek such narrowing constructions after the Supreme Court’s facial rulings, see Ford, supra, at 1444 n.11, or state officials cease enforcement of statutes when even a lower federal court holds a statute faci (...truncated)