Janus inspires another constitutional challenge. Jacob Huebert, James Baehr, and Dane Ciolino write:
[I]n Louisiana and 29 other states, some people—those who practice law—are being denied their rights not to speak, not to associate with a group against their will and not to pay for others’ political advocacy. In these states, the government forces lawyers to join and pay dues to bar associations to be allowed to pursue their chosen profession.
The bar associations these lawyers are forced to join and pay aren’t government regulatory bodies; they don’t just make sure attorneys are qualified and behave ethically, as one might expect. Instead, they’re trade associations, and all too often they use members’ mandatory dues to advocate for and against public policies, which may or may not have anything to do with the practice of law. This means lawyers in these states are being forced to pay for other people’s political and ideological speech—something the First Amendment virtually never allows.
For example, Louisiana’s mandatory bar association has used members’ dues to advocate for removal of “free enterprise” education from the state’s high school curriculum requirements. It’s also taken positions on a wide variety of other controversial issues ranging from the death penalty to drug policy to social issues. Many Louisiana lawyers might disagree with positions the bar takes—but they have to pay to promote the bar’s views anyway, if they want to continue earning their living by practicing law. [...]
Randy Boudreaux is one New Orleans lawyer who doesn’t want to pay for a bar association’s political advocacy—but has no choice. Today, lawyers from the Pelican Institute and the Goldwater Institute joined with New Orleans ethics lawyer and professor Dane S. Ciolino to file a federal lawsuit for Boudreaux. In the lawsuit, they argue that forcing Boudreaux to join and pay dues to the Louisiana State Bar Association violates his basic First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association.
Last year, in Janus v. AFSCME, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment prohibits governments from making their employees pay union fees—which inevitably fund unions’ political speech—just to keep their jobs. By the same reasoning, Boudreaux’s lawsuit says, lawyers shouldn’t be forced to pay for bar associations’ speech just to do their jobs.
[Jacob Huebert, James Baehr, and Dane S. Ciolino, “Louisiana Shouldn’t Force Its Lawyers to Pay for Speech They Don’t Support,” Pelican Institute, August 1]
