Christopher v. Harbury

The Court distinguished two forms of access claims. Forward-looking claims challenge current barriers to bringing future litigation, such as the lack of legal materials or an unaffordable filing fee. Backward-looking claims seek redress for a particular case or remedy already lost because official conduct made litigation impossible or ineffective. Harbury's claim was backward-looking because the emergency relief she said might have saved her husband could no longer be sought after his death.

The right of access to courts is ancillary to an underlying claim for judicial relief. A plaintiff is not injured merely because access was obstructed; she must have been obstructed from pursuing a nonfrivolous, arguable claim. Thus, the complaint must describe the predicate cause of action with enough clarity to give defendants fair notice, just as if that underlying action were being pleaded independently.

A backward-looking claim must also identify a remedy that the court can award in the access suit but that is unavailable in another current action. Otherwise, an access claim only duplicates a simpler suit for the underlying wrong and supplies no distinct basis for federal litigation. This requirement also prevents courts from trying speculative, unlitigated predicate claims without any prospect of providing additional relief.

Harbury's complaint alleged only that deception foreclosed her from seeking “adequate legal redress.” It did not identify the specific cause of action she would have brought while Bamaca was alive, nor did it identify a distinct remedy sought through the access claim. The pleading therefore left both the District Court and the defendants to guess at essential elements of the claim.

The Court stressed that precise pleading was particularly important here because the allegations concerned actions taken in the conduct of foreign relations. Early identification of a viable predicate claim allows a court to dismiss an insufficient claim before unnecessarily addressing constitutional questions or intruding into matters committed to the political branches.

At oral argument before the D.C. Circuit, Harbury's counsel identified intentional infliction of emotional distress as the claim on which she supposedly could have sought an emergency injunction. The Court treated that explanation as an informal amendment of the pleadings, but held that it still did not establish a viable backward-looking access claim.

Harbury had already pleaded intentional-infliction claims against the CIA defendants based on the torture, detention, and killing of Bamaca, and those claims remained pending after the District Court's ruling. If those claims were legally maintainable, they could provide damages and potentially other appropriate relief for the alleged wrongs. Her access claim therefore did not fill a remedial gap left by the other litigation.

Harbury could not now obtain the pre-death injunction that she says might have saved Bamaca, but an access-to-courts action could not provide that injunction either. She did not explain what relief the access claim could award beyond what was available through her surviving tort claims. Because the access action could not compensate a distinct injury in a way those claims could not, it was not a proper substitute for the lost opportunity to seek earlier emergency relief.

The Court did not decide the other substantial difficulties with the proposed intentional-infliction theory, including causation, the potential effect of foreign-affairs and separation-of-powers concerns, and whether the alleged facts actually established that tort. Those issues need not be resolved once Harbury failed to identify a remedy uniquely available through her access claim.