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application of a statute. A second distinction between the two is that a facial challenge may be brought soon after a statute's passage in a legislature; however, an as-applied challenge, as the name suggests, can only be brought once it has been enforced. In this sense, a facial challenge is prospective, or forward looking, because it seeks to prevent a law from being enforced and thus violating someone's constitutional rights, and an as-applied challenge is retrospective, or backward looking, because it seeks to redress a constitutional violation that has already occurred. Since facial challenges have the potential to invalidate a statute in its entirety, they are said to be disfavored. Legal scholar
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432:, 541 U.S. 600, 609 (2004) (internal quotation marks and brackets omitted). Facial challenges also run contrary to the fundamental principle of judicial restraint that courts should neither "anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it" nor "formulate a rule of constitutional law broader than is required by the precise facts to which it is to be applied."
442:, J., concurring). Finally, facial challenges threaten to short circuit the democratic process by preventing laws embodying the will of the people from being implemented in a manner consistent with the Constitution. We must keep in mind that " ruling of unconstitutionality frustrates the intent of the elected representatives of the people."
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Despite the claims of
Supreme Court Justices that facial challenges should be rare, empirical studies have been carried out that seem to prove otherwise. In 2011, Richard Fallon wrote an article claiming that the Supreme Court does effectively resort to facial challenges to decide upon the validity
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As discussed above, one primary distinction between the two methods of challenging legislation in court is that a facial challenge to a statute seeks to invalidate it in its entirety because every application is unconstitutional, whereas an as-applied challenge seeks to invalidate a particular
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If a facial challenge is successful, a court will declare the statute in question facially invalid, which has the effect of striking it down entirely. This contrasts with a successful as-applied challenge, which will result in a court narrowing the circumstances in which the statute may
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Because a successful facial challenge carries with it greater consequences than an as-applied challenge, i.e., the entire legislation is invalidated, the U.S. Supreme Court has declared facial challenges disfavored, which should, therefore, be used rarely. In
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Claims of facial invalidity often rest on speculation. As a consequence, they raise the risk of "premature interpretation of statutes on the basis of factually barebones records".
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of statutes more regularly than it claims. For instance, the court applied facial challenges to invalidate challenged statutes in
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in which the plaintiff alleges that the legislation is always unconstitutional, and therefore void. It is contrasted with an
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constitutionally be applied without striking it down. In some cases—e.g.,
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Roger Pilon, Facial v. As-Applied
Challenges: Does It Matter?
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Washington State Grange v. Washington State
Republican Party
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Washington State Grange v. Washington State
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Facial and As-Applied
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The
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