Page:Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson.pdf/11

6 United States, 219 U. S. 346, 361 (1911). Private parties who seek to bring S. B. 8 suits in state court may be litigants adverse to the petitioners. But the state-court clerks who docket those disputes and the state-court judges who decide them generally are not. Clerks serve to file cases as they arrive, not to participate as adversaries in those disputes. Judges exist to resolve controversies about a law’s meaning or its conformance to the Federal and State Constitutions, not to wage battle as contestants in the parties’ litigation. As this Court has explained, “no case or controversy” exists “between a judge who adjudicates claims under a statute and a litigant who attacks the constitutionality of the statute.” Pulliam v. Allen, 466 U. S. 522, 538, n. 18 (1984).

Then there is the question of remedy. Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 24 directs state-court clerks to accept complaints and record case numbers. The petitioners have pointed to nothing in Texas law that permits clerks to pass on the substance of the filings they docket—let alone refuse a party’s complaint based on an assessment of its merits. Nor does Article III confer on federal judges some “amorphous” power to supervise “the operations of government” and reimagine from the ground up the job description of Texas state-court clerks. Raines v. Byrd, 521 U. S. 811, 829 (1997) (internal quotation marks omitted).

Troubling, too, the petitioners have not offered any meaningful limiting principles for their theory. If it caught on and federal judges could enjoin state courts and clerks from entertaining disputes between private parties under this state law, what would stop federal judges from prohibiting state courts and clerks from hearing and docketing disputes between private parties under other state laws? And if the state courts and clerks somehow qualify as “adverse litigants” for Article III purposes in the present case, when would they not? The petitioners offer no satisfactory answers.