First Choice Women's Resource Centers v. Davenport
The Court holds that New Jersey's investigatory subpoena demanding First Choice Women's Resource Centers' donor information inflicts a present, ongoing injury to the group's First Amendment associational rights, giving it Article III standing to press its federal challenge.
Opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-781_pok0.pdf
Case background
First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, Inc., is a religious nonprofit that has provided counseling and resources to pregnant women in New Jersey since 1985, and does not provide or refer clients for abortions. In 2022, New Jersey’s Attorney General established a “Reproductive Rights Strike Force” and served First Choice with an investigatory subpoena demanding twenty-eight categories of documents, including the names, addresses, and other personal information of most of its donors. First Choice challenged the subpoena in federal court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 as a violation of its First Amendment rights, while the Attorney General sued to enforce the subpoena in state court. The federal district court held the constitutional claims were not ripe, and a divided Third Circuit panel affirmed per curiam, reasoning that First Choice could raise those claims in state court.
Questions Presented
- Where the subject of a state investigatory demand has established a reasonably objective chill of its First Amendment rights, is a federal court in a first-filed action deprived of jurisdiction because those rights must be adjudicated in state court?
Holding
First Choice has established a present injury to its First Amendment associational rights sufficient to confer Article III standing. The Attorney General’s subpoena, which demands disclosure of First Choice’s donors, has caused an ongoing, concrete injury to the group’s associational rights — an injury that is present now and does not depend on the outcome of the state enforcement proceeding.
The Court
Justice Gorsuch delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.
What this episode contains
This episode is an AI-narrated reading of the majority opinion in First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport, written by Justice Gorsuch.
AI disclosure: The voice in this episode is AI-generated, using a machine learning model styled to loosely resemble the authoring justice. Tone, inflection, pacing, and emphasis are artifacts of the model and should not be attributed to Justice Gorsuch. The text being read is the Court’s published majority opinion, lightly adapted to improve readability for the spoken format.