Thomas John Styczinski, et al. v. Grace Arnold, in Her Official Capacity as Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Commerce
JusticiabilityDoctri
Whether a federal court exceeds its Article III judicial power by unilaterally imposing a constitutional avoidance narrowing construction on a state law with extraterritorial economic regulation when the state's highest court has not previously narrowed the statute
1. Whether a federal court exceeds its “judicial power” under Article III and Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood when the federal court unilaterally imposes a constitutional avoidance narrowing construction on a state law, which contains direct extraterritorial regulation of out-of-state economic activities—in a situation where the state's highest court has not narrowed the statute in the first instance—and when the federal court rewrites the state law, under a severability analysis, contradicting the state law’s meaning for it to apply extraterritorially, creating a genuine circuit split regarding the scope of a federal court’s Article III judicial power to modify or amend state laws. 2. Whether following this Court’s decision in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, the Dormant Commerce Clause and equal sovereignty principles constitutionally limit the reach of a state’s economic regulatory scheme, which mandates that once an out-of-state bullion trader does the minimum amount of $25,000 of business within the State of Minnesota, all of the bullion trader’s out-of-state and global employees, dealers, contractors, agents, and dealer representatives must be screened, registered and pay a registration fee as if doing business in the state even though they are not doing so—or is the Eighth Circuit correct, such a state law is a permissible cost of transacting in Minnesota, not an extraterritorial regulation.