More on the Sixth Circuit panel

Circuit Judge Boyce F. Martin, Jr.:

President Carter appointed Judge Martin to the Sixth Circuit in 1979. He served as Chief Judge of the Sixth Circuit for several years, and is now Chief Judge Emeritus. As we noted yesterday, he stands out as one of the most liberal members of the federal judiciary. He wrote Grutter v. Bollinger, where the Sixth Circuit held that the University of Michigan Law School’s system of relying on race as a factor in its admissions policy was a narrowly tailored means of achieving a compelling interest. The Supreme Court of the United States later upheld this decision.

Circuit Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton:

President George W. Bush appointed Judge Sutton to the Sixth Circuit in 2001 and he was confirmed by the Senate in 2003. Prior to joining the court, Judge Sutton clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and served as Ohio’s state solicitor general from 1995 to 1998, where he was a vocal proponent of states’ rights. A Washington Post article noted that Sutton “attracted conservative support before his nomination by consistently pressing for states’ rights and challenging enforcement at the federal level of civil rights and disabilities laws.” The same article described Sutton as the “intellectual engine behind some of the majority’s more conservative opinions.” Sutton’s state’s rights credibility came under fire, however, after he ruled in the Ohio Republican Party’s favor in its attempt to have 200,000 registered democrats removed from the rolls.

District Judge James L. Graham:

President Reagan appointed Judge Graham to the federal bench in 1986. Judge Graham is now the Chief Judge of the Southern District of Ohio. Though his record does not contain much that would illuminate his views on structural constitutional law, he did gain some attention for his 2008 issuance of a temporary restraining order “against the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and the Ohio Department of Health preventing them from implementing proposed rules that would have eliminated Medicaid reimbursement for medically necessary Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) services to children with autism.”

Interesting development in Thomas More Law Center v. Obama

There has been a rather interesting development in Thomas More Law Center v. Obama, the case originating in the Eastern District of Michigan that will be argued before the Sixth Circuit on Wednesday, June 1. On Thursday afternoon, the clerk of the court sent the following letter to the parties' attorneys:

Dear Counsel:
I write at the direction of the panel to which the appeal noted above is to be argued on Wednesday afternoon, June 1, 2011. The court asks that you submit letter briefs of not more than ten pages, addressing the following questions: 

1. Standing/Ripeness. 

a. Have the plaintiffs alleged an injury in fact? If not, have they alleged an “imminent injury” creating a case of actual controversy under Article III and the Declaratory Judgment Act, even though they filed their complaint more than three years before the effective date of the challenged provisions? 

b. If the plaintiffs do not purchase minimum essential coverage and do not pay the penalty, what available enforcement mechanisms are available to the IRS? What role, if any, do IRS enforcement mechanisms play in the injury and hardship requirements? 

2. Facial/As-applied. 

Is the Commerce Clause challenge a facial challenge and, if so, must the plaintiffs prove “that no set of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid.” United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 745 (1987)? 

Your letter briefs are to be filed not later than May 23, 2011. Thanking you for your attention to this request, I am 

Very truly yours,
Leonard Green, Clerk

What to make of this? First, it appears that the panel has some qualms about standing--particularly, as to whether the current injury (such as having to set aside funds for the future purchase of health insurance) is sufficiently "concrete and particularized," or that, if the injury is having to purchase health insurance in the future, it is at least "imminent." Part of the complication, it appears, is that there may be no guarantee (perhaps) that the IRS will actually take action against them--or at least that is what the panel is interested in probing. All of this suggests, of course, that the panel might be looking for a way to resolve the case that avoids reaching the merits.

As to the second question, it makes me grab my head in pain. Is there anyone on the planet who can really explain the facial/as-applied distinction in the context of lawsuits challenging federal laws as exceeding Congress's enumerated powers? I had always assumed that, by their very nature, such claims were facial in the relevant sense (though cases like Raich arguably involve a facial challenge to a particular class of applications). Then the Supreme Court decided Tennessee v. Lane, and I have been hopelessly confused ever since. So perhaps there can be as-applied challenges in certain circumstances (though I do not hazard a guess as to what, exactly, defines those circumstances).

Again, the desire to have the Salerno question briefed seems to suggest that the panel might be looking for a means, other than reaching the merits, to make the case go away. And that would shift a few more eggs into the Florida v. HHS basket.

You can find the letter here. And the letter briefs are due a week from today.

Appellants' brief in Seven-Sky v. Holder

The plaintiff-appellants in Seven-Sky v. Holder (the case formerly known as Mead v. Holder) have filed their opening brief at the D.C. Circuit. Again, this is a case in which District Court Judge Gladys Kessler upheld the minimum coverage provision as a permissible exercise of Congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce (though she held that it was not a valid exercise of the taxing power). An exact date for oral argument has not yet been set, but the scheduling order indicates that it will take place some time in September.

You can access the brief here.

On the ACA litigation agenda

Here is a brief refresher of what we have to look forward to in the next three weeks:

* Tomorrow, May 16: challengers' opening brief due in Seven-Sky v. Holder (CADC)

* Wednesday, May 18: United States' reply brief/brief as cross-appellees due in Florida v. HHS (CA11)

* Monday, May 23: amicus briefs in support of the challengers due in Seven-Sky v. Holder (CADC)

* Wednesday, May 25: challengers' reply briefs due in Florida v. HHS (CA11)

* Wednesday, June 1: oral argument in Cincinnati in Thomas More Law Society v. Obama (CA6)

* Wednesday, June 8: oral argument in Atlanta in Florida v. HHS (CA11)

We should also learn next week, or perhaps the week after, the identity of the Eleventh Circuit panel in Florida v. HHS.

Activity, inactivity, and the power to regulate interstate commerce

Several chapters of this story have not yet been written, and it would be foolhardy to assert with any certainty that the ultimate result will turn on any one particular thing. But one factor that certainly stands out is whether the Supreme Court will ultimately hold that there is a salient difference (at least under the Commerce Clause) between Congress's regulation of activity and its regulation of inactivity (and, of course, whether the minimum coverage provision does, in fact, regulate "inactivity").

I do not want to weigh in on the normative merits of this debate. Rather, the point of this post is just to identity the nature of this debate, and locate it within constitutional doctrine. Specifically, I think all will have to agree (if so forced) that there is nothing in the Constitution's text or the Supreme Court's precedents that limits Congress to regulating only "activity" when it sets out to regulate interstate commerce. Once we accept that Congress can regulate non-commercial, intrastate practices (whether we say this power comes from the Commerce Clause alone or in conjunction with the Necessary and Proper Clause), then we are forced to admit that this power allows Congress to regulate behavior that is neither "interstate" nor "commerce" in its effort to regulate interstate commerce. And once we have left the text entirely in this respect, there is no textual reason to stop at "activity."

True enough, Supreme Court decisions have used the word "activity" hundreds of times to describe what Congress can regulate pursuant to its commerce power. But again, we all must admit that the justices were not using this word consciously, in contradistinction to inactivity. Congress was regulating an activity, and thus the word was apt as a descriptor. That does not make it a salient or necessary component of any of the Court's holdings.

So if we are to find a constitutional rule that limits the commerce power to the regulation only of "activities"--circumstances in which the regulated person has taken some voluntary act to subject himself to Congress's regulatory authority--it must come from broader, structural principles. Indeed, this is what the challengers (and their amici) rely on principally. It is a pragmatic, doctrinal argument: we must draw a line somewhere, the activity/inactivity line is a reasonably administrable one, and without it Congress's authority would be limitless.

It is a strong argument in many respects. Certainly, if the Supreme Court's modern Commerce Clause precedents stand for anything, it is that there must be some limit to Congress's legislative powers--that the Constitution does not grant the national government a general police power. And to be sure, the federal government has struggled a bit to articulate the "limiting principle" in its arguments that would uphold the minimum coverage provision.

But we should not get confused about the nature and origins of this proposed rule. It cannot be objectively correct in any meaningful sense, and it does not plainly come from the text of the Constitution. Rather, it is one possible way of reconciling the Constitution's basic structural principles with the necessary breadth of Congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce in modern times. Drawing the line at "activity" may be wise as a matter of policy, and thus sensible as a judicially-created constitutional doctrine. But it is being created on the fly, in response to this particular statute, at this particular moment in political time. (To my knowledge, no one had ever articulated this distinction prior to 2009.)

To be clear, asserting that this activity-inactivity distinction is being "created" is not to denigrate it. Really. Pretty much all constitutional doctrine is "made up" in this sense--a reaction to pressing events that aims to reconcile various conflicting constitutional values, according to certain broader constitutional (and political) visions. But this just underscores that there are no right answers here, nothing that the Constitution actually commands. There are different constitutional understandings, different weights that each of us might assign to different constitutional principles (liberty versus equality, for instance), and thus different possible doctrinal solutions. For some of us, virtually limitless federal authority is a significant threat to liberty. Some of us are, by contrast, less concerned with what Congress might do unchecked by judicial review, and more concerned with what happens to a society of extreme inequality, especially as it pertains to access to health care. Most of us probably have at least some concerns on both fronts.

The Supreme Court may or may not find the activity-inactivity distinction appealing; there are good arguments on both sides. But regardless, we should understand these arguments for what they are: creative constitutional proposals, but nothing clearly dictated by the Constitution itself.

Two district court dismissals

With the help of a very kind reader, I learned that I can retrieve some lost posts through Google reader. So here is a post from last week about the two lower court dismissals under F.R.C.P. 12(b)(1) for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.


Much has been happening, of course, in the high profile ACA cases--those with a good chance of getting to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, in the past three weeks, district courts have dismissed two lesser cases on the grounds that they lacked subject matter jurisdiction. More specifically, the courts held that the plaintiffs challenging the ACA lacked standing.

* On April 21, Judge Freda L. Wolfson (D.N.J.) held in Purpura v. Sebelius that the plaintiffs had failed to allege how they were personally harmed in any concrete way by the ACA. Thus, they failed to establish an injury-in-fact under Article III, and accordingly lacked standing. (This was a pro se case in which the plaintiffs, among other things, alleged that the ACA was unconstitutional because it had been signed into law by a person "ineligible to be President of the United States.")

* On April 26, Judge Rodney Sippel (E.D. Mo.) similarly held in Kinder v. Geithner that the plaintiffs had failed to allege that they were personally injured in any way by the ACA, and thus lacked standing. There are several plaintiffs in this case, raising a host of disparate claims. So I hesitate to summarize the court's reasoning in just a few sentences. Suffice it to say that, at least with respect to the individual mandate, the court's decision was extremely narrow and factbound. The plaintiffs had failed to allege that they would not purchase health insurance, or that the mandate was affecting them in some way currently. Likewise, they could not demonstrate how any of the obligations imposed on the State of Missouri were injuring them, in a concrete and personal way.

You can access the District Court for the District of New Jersey's opinion in Purpura v. Sebelius here.

And you can access the District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri's opinion in Kinder v. Geithner here.

Again, these cases are peripheral (at best) in the grand scheme of things. Neither court reached the merits, and neither said much (if anything) important about the broader standing questions in play. The game is now focused, almost exclusively, on the five cases with a chance to get to the Supreme Court.

Florida v. HHS amicus briefs

So here we go again, in alphabetical order. These are the briefs that were filed on Wednesday in support of the plaintiff-appellees (the twenty-six states, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, and the two private individuals) at the Eleventh Circuit.

* The brief for the American Center for Law and Justice and 74 Members of Congress is here.

* The brief for the American Legislative Exchange Council is here.

* The brief for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons et al. is here.

* The brief for House Speaker John Boehner is here.

* The brief for the Catholic Medical Association et al. is here.

* The brief for the CATO Institute is here.

* The brief for Doctors4PatientCare et al. is here.

* The brief for the Family Research Council is here.

* The brief for the Heritage Foundation is here.

* The brief for the Independence Institute et al. is here.

* The brief for the Justice and Freedom Fund is here.

* The brief for the Landmark Legal Foundation is here.

* The brief for Minnesota legislators and North Carolina legislative leaders is here.

* The brief for the Mountain States Legal Foundation is here.

* The brief for the Physician Hospitals of America is here.

* The brief for Revere America Foundation is here.

* The brief for the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce (complete version) is here.

* The brief for the Texas Public Policy Foundation is here.

* The brief for the Washington Legal Foundation and Constitutional Law Scholars is here.

All of these briefs, along with all the others filed in Florida v. HHS, are permanently accessible in the righthand column on this page.

Apologies

My apologies for the disruption here over the past few days. Blogger went down on Thursday, and apparently all of the posts from Wednesday and Thursday were lost. I was waiting to see whether they might reappear, and thus save me the time of reconstructing them. But alas . . . no such luck. So I will try now to get those back up--most importantly, all the amicus curiae briefs filed in support of the plaintiff-appellees in Florida v. HHS. Thanks for your patience.

More on the Sixth Circuit panel

Judge Boyce F. Martin, Jr.:

President Carter appointed Judge Martin to the Sixth Circuit in 1979. He served as Chief Judge of the Sixth Circuit for several years, and is now Chief Judge Emeritus. As we noted yesterday, he stands out as one of the most liberal members of the federal judiciary. He wrote Grutter v. Bollinger, where the Sixth Circuit held that the University of Michigan Law School’s system of relying on race as a factor in its admissions policy was a narrowly tailored means of achieving a compelling interest. The Supreme Court of the United States later upheld this decision.

Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton:

President George W. Bush appointed Judge Sutton to the Sixth Circuit in 2001 and he was confirmed by the Senate in 2003. Prior to joining the court, Judge Sutton clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and served as Ohio’s state solicitor general from 1995 to 1998, where he was a vocal proponent of states’ rights. A Washington Post article noted that Sutton “attracted conservative support before his nomination by consistently pressing for states’ rights and challenging enforcement at the federal level of civil rights and disabilities laws.” The same article described Sutton as the “intellectual engine behind some of the majority’s more conservative opinions.” Sutton’s state’s rights credibility came under fire, however, after he ruled in the Ohio Republican Party’s favor in its attempt to have 200,000 registered democrats removed from the rolls.

Judge James L. Graham:

President Reagan appointed Judge Graham to the federal bench in 1986. Judge Graham is now the Chief Judge of the Southern District of Ohio. Though his record is does not contain much that would illuminate his views on structural constitutional law, he did gain some attention for his 2008 issuance of a temporary restraining order “against the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and the Ohio Department of Health preventing them from implementing proposed rules that would have eliminated Medicaid reimbursement for medically necessary Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) services to children with autism.”

Summaries of amicus briefs from Florida v. HHS

The American Center for Law and Justice and 74 Members of Congress:

Here, amici make the following arguments. First, amici argue that the district court was correct in determining that the “Section 1501 of the PPACA is unconstitutional because it exceeds Congress’s Article I authority.” In support, they write that the individual mandate (1) “exceeds the boundaries of Congress’s Commerce Clause power,” and (2) that “[u]pholding the individual mandate would effectively confer upon Congress ‘a plenary police power’ . . . over all individual economic decisions and places Americans’ economic liberty at risk.”

Second, amici argue that, “Because Section 1501 is not severable from the remainder of the of the PPACA, the entire PPACA is invalid.”

More analysis of today's arguments

I apologize if I am missing anyone. I am just listing those items worth reading as I find them:

* Jennifer Haberkorn has this in Politico.

* Ariane de Vogue has this at ABC News.

* Tim Jost has this at Health Affairs.

* Andrew Cohen has this at The Atlantic.

* Dahlia Lithwick has this at Slate.

* Kevin Walsh, via Orin Kerr, has this at the Volokh Conspiracy.

* Lyle Denniston has this at SCOTUSblog.

* Meghan McCarthy has this at the National Journal.

* Warren Richey has this at the Christian Science Monitor.

* Milton Wolf has this at Fox News.

* Ashby Jones has this in the Wall Street Journal.

* Rosalind Helderman has this in the Washington Post.

No initial en banc hearing in Baldwin v. Sebelius

Catching up on some of the other cases . . . .

On April 15, the Ninth Circuit added the following entry on the docket sheet in Baldwin v. Sebelius:

No active judge has requested a vote to hear this case initially en banc within the time allowed by General Order 5.2.a. The request is therefore denied.

Again, this case is unlikely to matter much, and for two reasons. First, the district court only reached the standing question. Thus, although the parties briefed the constitutionality of the minimum coverage provision on the merits, it seems unlikely the Ninth Circuit would reach that question with no judgment on that issue under review. Second, the Ninth Circuit has yet to schedule oral argument. So it seems unlikely, purely as a matter of timing, that this will be the one to reach the Supreme Court; other cases should beat it there.

Sixth Circuit panel announced

While everyone's eyes were on Richmond, there was another big ACA-litigation-related development today in Cincinnati: the three-judge panel of Sixth Circuit judges has been announced for Thomas More Law Center v. Obama. The judges are:

* Circuit Judge Boyce F. Martin, Jr. (appointed by President Carter)

* Circuit Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton (appointed by President George W. Bush)

* District Judge James L. Graham (S.D. Ohio, sitting by designation) (appointed by President Reagan)

I know very little yet about Judge Graham, but obviously this is a very different panel ideologically from the one that heard Liberty University v. Geithner and Virginia v. Sebelius today at the Fourth Circuit. First, it is majority Republican. Second, Judge Sutton made his name, to some degree, arguing federalism cases at the Supreme Court on behalf of states (principally in his prior role as Solicitor General for the State of Ohio). So he is not only a Bush appointee, but one who is committed to the structural constitutional limitations on the federal government vis-a-vis the states. Third--to make things even more interesting--Judge Martin's reputation is as one of the most liberal judges in the entire federal judiciary.

Today's Fourth Circuit panel seemed to see things in a largely similar fashion. That seems unlikely at the Sixth Circuit on June 1.

Some news coverage and reaction

Some news coverage and other reactions to today's arguments:

* Tom Schoenberg of Bloomberg News here.

* Ian Millhiser of Think Progress here.

* Jeremy Pelofsky and Lisa Lambert of Reuters here.

* David Savage of the L.A. Times here.

* Bill Mears of CNN here.

Some initial impressions

I just finished listening to the two-plus hours of argument, and here are some impressions, in no particular order:

1. The court may well hold that Virginia lacks standing. Many have been pointing this out for quite some time, but Virginia really has a standing problem. Judge Davis, for one, clearly seemed to think there is no standing here. And the court let Virginia's lawyer talk about the merits for only about three minutes--his remaining twenty were on justiciability. A couple of items of note here: (1) Virginia never fell back to what is now the frontline state claim to standing in Florida v. HHS--that the mandate will force more individuals to enroll in Medicaid, and thus injure the state's fisc; and (2) the Virginia lawyer almost suggested that the Supreme Court had implicitly overruled Massachusetts v. Mellon--a claim that seems rather implausible since all nine justices reaffirmed its validity in Massachusetts v. EPA three years ago. This just seemed to undermine Virginia's claim to standing even further.

2. The court seemed skeptical of the activity-inactivity distinction. Indeed, the court seemed skeptical on two levels (and this was only really discussed in the Liberty University argument). First, the judges seemed skeptical that there was anything in the Supreme Court's precedent that drew any sort of a distinction, for commerce power purposes, between "activity" and "inactivity." (Judge Motz showed some historical chops in noting that many of Chief Justice Marshall's Commerce Clause decisions do not reference the term "activity" at all.) Second, they seemed skeptical that activity can be meaningfully distinguished from "inactivity"--that is, they appeared to embrace the idea that the distinction is largely (though perhaps not entirely) semantic.

3. The court did not press General Katyal too hard on the government's "limiting principle."  Certainly, the judges did press the point. There was a fair amount of discussion of broccoli and GM automobiles and the housing market, for sure. But the judges did not seem skeptical or hostile to General Katyal's responses. In other words, it was a marked contrast to the hearing such explanations received from Judges Hudson and Vinson.

Overall, the judges were far more hospitable to the arguments presented by the United States than those presented by the plaintiffs. It is dangerous to draw too many inferences from oral argument, of course, but I think today went very well for General Katyal and the federal government.

In short, I will be surprised if the Fourth Circuit does not unanimously reject the challenges here. (There might be a split in Virginia v. Sebelius, however, over whether the Commonwealth has standing, and thus whether the court should even reach the merits in that case.)

Audio now available

You can access the argument in Liberty University v. Geithner here.

You can access the argument in Virginia v. Sebelius here.

If you want to download these as podcasts, rightclick and select "save link as" and then proceed to save as an MPEG Layer 3 audio file.

Arguments have ended

And they lasted more than two hours!

The first media reports are filtering in. Here is one from the Richmond Times Dispatch, and here is a brief AP story.

More soon.

UPDATE: And here is a report from the Washington Post.

And this from Kaiser Health News.

UPDATE 2: The media reports thus far are quite incomplete, so I will reserve judgment until I have had a chance to listen to the arguments myself in full. But it sounds as if the panel was quite engaged on the question whether Virginia lacks standing. Again, if Virginia lacks standing, it would not be that important to the end game; there are several plaintiffs in the other cases that pretty clearly have standing to challenge the minimum coverage provision. But a dismissal of Attorney General Cuccinelli's case would certainly be a symbolic victory for the administration.

What were the chances?

The Obama administration clearly had some luck on its side today, drawing three Democratic appointees (and in Judge Motz, the intellectual leader of the left on the Fourth Circuit).

This naturally prompts the question: what was the probability of the panel being comprised of three Democratic appointees? In other words, how lucky was the administration?

Lucky, but not remarkably so.

The Fourth Circuit currently has eight Democratic appointees and five Republican appointees (assuming we count Judge Gregory as a Democrat). Thus, the computation (if I am recalling my work from Stats 61 correctly) is as follows:

Probability of draw 1 = 8/13 = .61538

Probability of draw 2 = 7/12 = .58333

Probability of draw 3 = 6/11 = .54545

The product of the three is .195802. In other words, the chances of three Democrats being on the panel was roughly 20 percent.

So the federal government was fortunate, but not in any sort of crazy, outlier way.

UPDATE: This computation assumes that Judge Hamilton, a G.H.W. Bush appointee now on senior status, was excluded from the pool. If we include him fully in the denominator (a conservative assumption), the probability of an all-Democrat panel was roughly 15.4 percent. If Judge Hamilton's chances of being assigned to the panel were less than that of the active judges, then the likelihood of an all-Democrat panel was somewhere between 15.4 percent and 20 percent.

Fourth Circuit panel announced

Here is the panel for this morning's arguments in Liberty University v. Geithner and Virginia v. Sebelius:

* Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, appointed by President Clinton.

Motz is no Stephen Reinhardt, but she is relatively liberal, at least for a Democrat on the Fourth Circuit. Among her more famous rulings, she voted to reverse a district court decision that had ordered an end to school busing for desegregation in Richmond, and she held in the al-Marri case that the President could not declare civilians legally residing in the United States to be "enemy combatants" and hold them in military detention indefinitely. She did author the opinion ruling against the government in United States v. Comstock, however, a case concerning federalism and, specifically, the breadth of the Necessary and Proper Clause.

* Judge Andre M. Davis, appointed by President Obama.

Again, indications are that he is a relatively liberal judge, at least for the Fourth Circuit (though I concede the term is a bit crude in this context). One example: United States v. White, 620 F.3d 401 (CA4 2010), in which he held (over a dissent from Judge Niemeyer) that it was an unconstitutional deprivation of liberty to force a prisoner to take anti-psychotic drugs.

* Judge James A. Wynn, appointed by President Obama.

Same general liberal lean, at least based on what we know. Consider Legend Night Club v. Miller, 2011 WL 541136 (CA4 2011), in which Judge Wynn invalidated a Maryland statute that effectively prohibited adult entertainment establishments from selling alcoholic beverages at their clubs. Writing for the court, Judge Wynn held that the statute was subject to intermediate scrutiny under the First Amendment, and that it was unconstitutionally overbroad. Judge Clyde Hamilton--a G.H.W. Bush appointee, now on senior status--dissented.

As the senior judge on the panel, Judge Motz will preside, and the odds are that she would assign the opinion to herself.

This could not have turned out much better for the United States and General Katyal.

Some additional resources

A couple of new resources have appeared on the web recently that are worth adding to your bookmarks, if they are not there already:

* SCOTUSblog has added a page dedicated to the ACA challenges, with coverage by their excellent, longtime Supreme Court correspondent Lyle Denniston. You can access that page here.

* I'm unsure exactly when this happened, but DOJ has created a page on its web site with all of the federal government's filings in the various lawsuits. That page is accessible here.