Burton H. Wolfe v. Ronald M. George, Chief Justice Deborah Silva

This is a challenge to the California vexatious litigant statute on numerous constitutional grounds.

Facts

Burton H. Wolfe filed a number of pro se complaints regarding San Francisco taxicab companies. In 1992, the Superior Court for the County of San Francisco deemed him a “vexatious litigant” and imposed a prefiling order. As we explain below, the order required Wolfe to present his complaints for review by a judge before filing them. The order was rescinded in 1999, and in less than a year Wolfe filed another six lawsuits in the state courts.

Wolfe brought this Section 1983 case in federal court, challenging the constitutionality of California’s vexatious litigant statute. The district court dismissed the case under the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. Wolfe appeals for the second time. In our previous decision, we rejected application of the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, because Wolfe was not seeking federal relief from a state court judgment. We concluded that Wolfe had standing and a ripe dispute, even though no vexatious litigant order applied to him when he sued, because his history of lawsuits and the recently rescinded prefiling order showed that he was sufficiently likely to be…