Actually, Disney’s Lawsuit Against DeSantis Is Really Troubling
Oops it turns out Disney’s lawsuit against the Florida governor is based on a constitutional clause which says that states can’t pass laws to interfere with private contracts. Historically this is something courts have used to strike down basic labour protections like minimum wages. So if the Supreme Court decides to give Disney a win here by saying “um actually any contact betwen private individuals is completely fine and beyond any kind of state regulation” (which would be wildly broad but also that’s how this Supreme Court sometimes behaves) then stay tuned for a lot of terrible lawsuits eroding a lot of basic protections for workers and renters and anyone else who’s signed a contract with a vastly more powerful entity.
[[sadly puts away my “let them fight” jpeg and pulls out my “no matter who wins, we lose” jpeg]]
This is such a bad take, that clause is specifically about contracts that the government is a party in. ie the government can’t just say “just kidding” after they got the benefits of a contract.
So…The article zeroes in on that one argument, but there are five bases listed in the actual filing.
The filing is linked at the beginning of the article, and I’ll link it directly here:
https://href.li/?https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23789600/file-stamped-disney-complaint1.pdf
If Disney wins, that doesn’t automatically set the precedent that all their arguments are valid. It will set precedent based on which arguments are determined to be valid, and it is very unlikely that the contracts clause one is going to be the sweeping nuclear bomb the article makes it out to be.
They have him dead to rights on a First Amendment violation, and the rest is there because Disney hires good lawyers who can and will use every legal argument of relevance to bear.
In short, the Slate article feels like one hell of a stretch, and I’m not sure why it focused on that one thing beyond trying to make Disney look worse than their standard perception as The Ultimate Evil Megacorp already did.