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Locke v. Karass: Moderation at the Supreme Court
January 21, 2009 by Ross Runkel at LawMemo
A public sector local union collects a service fee from non-member employees, and sends some of that money to its national affiliate to be spent on litigation. The non-members objected, and the US Supreme Court today unanimously rejected the non-members' complaint. Locke v. Karass (US Supreme Court 01/21/2009).
Quick legal background: This is a 1st amendment issue, the concern being that an individual ought not be forced to pay for a union's political activities or for any activities that are not connected to the union's role as a collective bargaining representative. In a series of decisions, the US Supreme Court has allowed a union to charge non-members for expenses that have an appropriate relationship to collective bargaining activities.
More focused legal background: What about a local union that sends some of this money to its national affiliate? The Supreme Court has allowed this in general. Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Assoc., 500 US 507 (1991). However, in the Lehnert case the Supreme Court couldn't collect a majority of Justices to decide how to handle funds that would be used for litigation outside of the local bargaining unit. The Court split into three factions on this issue, so there really was no "opinion by the Court" on the issue.
A moderate approach in Locke v. Karass: The Court today simply took the fundamental legal analysis that had been used before and applied it to the case. This was "moderate" because everybody on the Court rallied around one legal theory instead of breaking up in splinters, and the legal theory they followed was already well-established.
In other words: The Court did not fly off into splinters. The Court did not really plow any new ground.
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