Laguna Honda is a convalescent home in a park-like setting in San Francisco, among the hills, trees, and bushes, which are home to all sorts of birds and wildlife. And homeless people living where they're not readily seen by motorists driving by. The neighbors see the homeless, of course and have called the sheriff's department who along with social workers, descend on the scene to roust the homeless out of there along with their makeshift shelters. As long as they were clearing the place out, the director of the home decided it would be a good idea to clear out the underbrush that the homeless took advantage of to conceal their camps.
So Laguna Honda called up the local goatherd and made a deal to bring in a herd of goats. I'm not making this up. This is something we do in San Francisco when something bothers us. We call in a herd of something and poof! the problem is gone.
Not so fast!
In Constitutional Law we study lots of interesting things including the effect that a treaty has in constitutional terms, such as whether a treaty with another nation may deprive us of our individual constitutional rights, such as to a jury trial, for example. We had a treaty with Britain over military bases and when the wife of one of our servicemen stationed in England killed her husband in a domestic quarrel, she was tried by an American military court there with no jury, in accordance with the treaty. She hollered foul, she was an American and had a right to a jury trial, and the Supreme Court said that international treaties do not trump the constitutional rights of an individual. Reid v. Covert.
We have another case, which gives rise to this post, on the subject of whether the states have any power in the face of an international treaty which has the effect of limiting that power. It came up when the State of Missouri tried to stop federal agents from enforcing federal laws against shooting birds during hunting season. People in Missouri like to shoot their birds. But we, the U.S., belongs to the International Migratory Bird Treaty with Great Britain and Canada, which puts a duty on the U.S. to protect Canada geese, ducks, and other birds that fly up and down the continent as part of their annual cycle.
When the Audubon Society heard that Laguna Honda was going to bring in a herd of goats to chew up the underbrush, it called up and said that the convalescent home might place itself in violation of this international treaty. The mating season was about to begin and eating the underbrush, according to Matier and Ross, the political columnists for the San Francisco Chronicle, from which this account comes, "might make life harder for the six types of birds thought to nest in the area."
So one day the administrator for the home, representatives of the Audubon Society, the Sheriff's Department, the City Attorneys Office, and the ground crew put on their boots and took a walk through the area, where they saw three protected species of birds: the California towhee, the white crowned warbler, and the bush-tit.
So the herd of goats had to be put on hold until after the mating season. Audubon people know all about bird mating seasons, and it's a good thing they do, otherwise we'd ruin it for the birds.
"Nothing is easy in San Francisco," the Laguna Hospital administrator said, "But then, that's the challenge of working here."
***
I'll bet that the deputy city attorney came up to speed fast on Missouri v. Holland, the big case on treaties, and the International Bird Treaty, opinion by O.W. Holmes, Jr.
Who would have thought that the act of cleaning up the weeds had international ramifications.
Conlaw is all around us, I say (it's the subtitle of this blog) and you ignore it at your peril, which is easy to do if you're not careful.
One of the reasons for the Bridge Walks we like to do on Saturday mornings is to notice some of the Conlaw that surrounds us. We see the ships on San Francisco Bay (instrumentalities of interstate commerce) sailing out the Golden Gate (a channel of interstate commerce), and take pictures of the Great Herons in the marsh, along with the Anna's Hummingbirds gathering nectar from the surrounding bushes.
We note the orange pilot boats that pick up and deliver harbor pilots to the ocean liners that enter and exit the port daily. Cooley vs. the Board of Wardens of the Port of Philadelphia is a John Marshall opinion recognizing a concurrent state police power to regulate local safety issues (ships crashing on reefs that only local pilots know about) despite harbors being federal waters subject to Congressional power.
This was the famous "Cooley Compromise" that averted a showdown between conflicting sovereignties. Feds could regulate on national issues, and states could lay down some safety rules regarding local safety issues without clashing with the feds. Neat. Orange Pilot boats call this to mind and give us a chance to remind ourselves, in a group, out loud. Otherwise we forget.
We observed fellow walkers, before the last election, you remember, the blue and red states? in groups wearing T-shirts protesting candidate Bush and asking where their constitutional rights would be if he were reelected (this is San Francisco, after all).
So we got a kick out of this confirmation that Constitutional Law is all around us, and all you had to do was to keep your eyes open. We discussed coming up with T-shirts of our own, complete with Conlaw Logos. Somehow that idea didn't make it past the talking stage, but it may be an idea whose time has come.
I'm thinking of birds and ships, pilot boats and goats...
The Constitutional Law Marching and Chowder Society. We'll give the Federalist Society a run for their money, perhaps.