In an appeal filed in February 2021, the Institute for Justice asked the U.S. Supreme Court to examine the question of whether federal judges have unfettered discretion to unilaterally inject their own arguments or legal theories into cases where state action is challenged and reaffirm that the federal courts cannot act as advocates for the state.
Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services, Inc. (“Marcus & Millichap”) is a commercial real estate investment services company with offices throughout the U.S. and Canada. In the U.S., Marcus & Millichap brokers commercial real estate investment transactions that are inherently complex and national in scope. Most states accommodate the sort of interstate brokerage work that Marcus & Millichap performs. Nevada, however, requires individual licensees to maintain a physical presence in the state and prohibits most out-of-state broker involvement, even if working in cooperation with a local broker. As one of Nevada’s enforcers admitted, the law serves to prevent outsiders from “taking business away from our Nevada licensees.”
Marcus & Millichap filed suit in 2016 in federal court to challenge Nevada’s system as protectionist and unconstitutional. The trial court ultimately upheld Nevada’s law and Marcus & Millichap appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Marcus & Millichap asked the court of appeals to rule that the trial court had erred. The state of Nevada then asked the court of appeals to rule that the trial court got things right.
Rather than deciding which side was right, the 9th Circuit resurrected a procedural argument that no one had made on appeal, called “Younger abstention.” The Younger doctrine says that federal courts shouldn’t interfere with state-court enforcement proceedings. The problem, though, was that Nevada hadn’t asked the court of appeals to apply the Younger doctrine. Nevada, when pressed at oral argument, suggested that the omission had been deliberate.
Even so, the 9th Circuit raised Younger abstention unprompted and dismissed the case. The court introduced a theory no party had presented. It gave no reason for taking that unusual step, and on the strength of that new theory, it withdrew the federal courts from a case they had the power to decide.
Marcus & Millichap and its brokers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in. The 9th Circuit’s decision spotlighted a broader phenomenon: courts of appeals’ exercising unconstrained and unexplained discretion to inject procedural hurdles into civil rights cases. The result is arbitrariness on a national scale. Across several courts of appeals, a subset of federal plaintiffs found themselves randomly ejected from federal court on Younger grounds. In all these cases, the federal courts have the power to address the merits. They can rightly exercise that power. Yet appellate courts raise Younger unilaterally, leaving parties unable to proceed in federal court. Represented by the Institute for Justice, Marcus & Millichap asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
The Court denied review in May 2021.
Case Team
Staff

John E. Kramer
Vice President for Strategic Relations
Case Documents
Cert Petition
Media Resources
Get in touch with the media contact and take a look at the image resources for the case.
John E. Kramer Vice President for Strategic Relations [email protected]
Related Cases

Economic Liberty | First Amendment | Private Property | Vending
Small business owners sue to strike down Jacksonville regulations effectively banning food trucks from city
Jacksonville, North Carolina effectively bans food trucks from operating in 96 percent of the city. That's why a group of small business owners has teamed up with the Institute for Justice to file a lawsuit…

Economic Liberty
Woman challenges Arizona city's ban on feeding people for "charitable purposes"
Norma Thornton was arrested for feeding the hungry in Bullhead City Community Park. Now, Norma has teamed up with IJ to fight back against Bullhead's law criminalizing charitable sharing in federal court.

Economic Liberty | First Amendment | Occupational Licensing | Occupational Speech
Entrepreneur Fined $1,000 for Using Public Information to Draw Lines on Maps Files Federal Lawsuit Against California
Do you need a government license to trace a map from publicly available data? It might sound ridiculous, but in California the answer is “yes.” An entrepreneur joined with the Institute for Justice (IJ) to…