In 2015, Justice Kagan declared: “We’re all textualists now.” Seven years later, she then doubted her own proclamation, at least as applied to her colleagues on the Supreme Court of the United States. But regardless of how unwavering the federal bench’s commitment to textualism might be, the California Supreme Court’s recent opinion in Sellers v. Superior Court makes clear that the same textualist orthodoxy might have less purchase here in California. In Sellers, a unanimous court reached a narrowing construction of a statute criminalizing the transport of marijuana in a vehicle, relying expressly on the statute’s purpose even without any express finding of textual ambiguity. That opinion serves as an important reminder that in California, there are limits to exclusively relying on “text” when interpreting a statute. Further, the opinion provides useful guidance on how to derive a statute’s “purpose.”
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The question presented in Sellers is something a fun law school professor might come up with as a statutory interpretation or Fourth Amendment hypothetical—but it was a question with real consequences for Defendant Sellers. Sellers was in the front passenger seat of a car when the car was pulled over for failing to fully stop before a crosswalk. Other than that traffic violation, there was nothing suspicious about the car. But upon shining their flashlights into the car, the officers noticed a “rolling tray on the backseat” and “weed crumbs” scattered on the rear floorboard. The officers had Sellers and the driver step out of the car to conduct a search of the vehicle. The “weed crumbs” scraped off the floor weighed 0.36 grams. And the officers located an unregistered pistol near the front passenger seat—resulting in Sellers being charged with unlawful possession of a firearm by a person adjudged a ward of the juvenile court.
Sellers moved to suppress evidence of the gun on the basis that the vehicle search was improper. Central to that inquiry was whether the officers’ identification of the loose “weed crumbs” on the rear floorboard constituted probable cause of a violation of Health and Safety Code section 11362.3, subd. (a)(4). That provision, enacted via Proposition 64 as part of a broader voter initiative on marijuana legalization and regulation, prohibits a person from “[p]ossess[ing] an open container or open package of cannabis or cannabis products while driving, operating, or riding in the passenger seat or compartment of a motor vehicle.”
The Court of Appeal rejected a “literal interpretation” of the statute that would have required the “presence of a container.” Instead, it reasoned that such a literal reading would “undermine the purpose of the open container law,” which is to ensure that marijuana is transported in an “inaccessible” manner while in a vehicle. Sellers petitioned the California Supreme Court for review.
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Writing for a unanimous court and reversing in Sellers’s favor, Justice Liu “partly” agreed and “partly” disagreed with the Court of Appeal. Notably, both the Court’s agreement and disagreement turned on its understanding of the “purpose” of the statue.
The Court first agreed that a literal interpretation requiring the presence of a container would “contradict the statute’s manifest purpose.” Although it acknowledged that it did not “lightly depart from the plain meaning of a legislative enactment,” the Court reasoned that doing so here was necessary to forward the statutory goal of “reduc[ing] impaired driving by inhibiting ready access” to marijuana. After all, a literal reading would mean that “an open bag of marijuana gummies would violate the provision, but the same gummies dumped into the console would not.”
But unlike the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court went further in assessing statutory purpose. Looking more widely to the “purpose and context of Proposition 64,” the Court reasoned that interpreting the statute to apply to “any loose marijuana” would be too broad as well. Instead, the Court reasoned that “at a minimum, to constitute a violation of section 11362.3, subdivision (a)(4), marijuana in a vehicle must be of usable quantity, in imminently usable condition, and readily accessible to an occupant.”
As support for this usability and accessibility standard, the Court turned to the purposes of Proposition 64, which it gleaned from the Voter Guide accompanying that ballot measure. Those materials indicated that Proposition 64 was broadly intended to reduce the “waste of law enforcement resources” then associated with marijuana arrests. Specific to marijuana in vehicles, the Voter Guide “emphasized that Proposition 64 would continue to prohibit impaired driving,” thereby “leav[ing] no doubt that the electorate’s primary vehicle-related concern was impaired driving.” And the Court also observed that caselaw on open-container laws both in and out of the marijuana context had relied on “concepts such as usability, accessibility, and enablement of consumption” when defining the scope of those provisions.
Because “the purpose, context, and caselaw” regarding the open-container provision in Proposition 64 suggested that “what it covers is conduct bearing a discernible nexus to the potential for impaired driving,” the Court held that the small amount of “weed crumbs” behind Sellers’s seat did not give rise to probable cause of a violation of the law.
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“Weed crumbs” aside, the Court’s opinion in Sellers offers notable reminders for those engaging in the interpretation of California’s statutes.
First, the “text” of the statute is only the beginning point of the statutory interpretation analysis even in the absence of ambiguity. Under federal interpretive principles, it is often argued that courts should look to indicia of a statute’s purpose only when statutory text is ambiguous. But notably in Sellers, the California Supreme Court looked to the statute’s purpose and context even without any express finding of textual ambiguity, thereby suggesting such ambiguity does not play the same gating function in California.
Second, in defining the “purpose” of a given statutory provision, context and the level of generality matters. Key to the different conclusions reached by the Court of Appeal and the California Supreme Court in Sellers appears to have been the latter’s assessment of the purposes of Proposition 64 as a whole—as opposed to just section 11362.3, subd. (a)(4) in particular. Thus, while the Court of Appeal identified the relevant purpose as the need to prevent circumvention of the specific open-container provision, the Supreme Court addressed the proposition’s higher purpose of reducing needless marijuana arrests while still protecting against intoxicated driving. This may just be an application of the familiar principle that “context” matters when divining statutory meaning, but is nevertheless a good reminder of how to glean statutory “purpose.”
Third, when it comes to California ballot measures, Voter Guides remain a critical source for divining statutory purpose. Justice Scalia may have famously argued that looking to legislative history is like “walking into a crowded cocktail party and looking over the heads of the guests to pick out your friends,” but Sellers reinforces that, at least in California, a Voter Guide is a friend indeed. Continuing a tradition under which California courts have relied on such ballot materials, Sellers again looked at the various parts of the Voter Guide accompanying Proposition 64—from the arguments listed in favor of the proposition to the analysis offered by the Legislative Analyst—when determining the statute’s purpose.
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