Andrew Tutt on the Torres Case, State Sovereign Immunity, and Congress's War Powers

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

One of the last decisions that the Supreme Court handed down this year was Torres v. Texas Department of Public Safety. Le Roy Torres, an Iraq war veteran and Texas state trooper, sued the state of Texas after he was denied an employment accommodation for injuries he sustained while on duty. The question in the case was whether the federal law that Torres sued under could subject states themselves to legal liability. In other words, as a constitutional matter, can Congress, when legislating under its war powers, limit the normal sovereign immunity that state governments enjoy? This is an important question, not just for veterans who want to vindicate their rights, but also more broadly because Congress's war powers are some of the broadest and most consequential that the federal government possesses.

Lawfare senior editor Alan Rozenshtein talked through these issues with Andrew Tutt, a lawyer at the law firm of Arnold & Porter, who argued and won the case on behalf of Torres before the Supreme Court.

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0:00.0	The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair
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0:58.8	This had an embedded federal courts question and it just in trying to secure review, which
1:02.4	is how do you get review after a state Supreme Court has denied review of your case.
1:09.0	So what happened was the Supreme Court of Texas has discretionary review.
1:14.7	Now we argued to the Texas Supreme Court that we met five of the six criteria for discretionary
1:21.1	review, including that an intermediate court of appeals in Texas had held a federal law
1:26.8	unconstitutional, which you would think would be something the Texas Supreme Court would
1:31.7	want to take a look at.
1:34.0	But they denied review.
1:36.2	And so what the United States Supreme Court has said is that, you know, a state cannot
1:41.6	block the United States Supreme Court from ultimately being the final arbiter of federal
1:46.4	law.
1:47.4	I'm Alan Rosenstein and this is the Law Fair Podcast, August 22, 2022.
	...

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