Decades ago, recalling the court’s early 20th-century invalidation of just such schemes in cases involving land use and zoning, we successfully invoked the civil parallel of the Ku Klux Klan Act to prevent the neighbor of Harvard Square restaurant Grendel’s Den from wielding a state-conferred veto power over the issuance of any liquor license within a 500-foot radius. That statute was enacted by Congress specifically to provide a federal judicial remedy for violations of constitutional rights when state judicial remedies were blocked, as they clearly are by the structure of the Texas abortion law…

That same danger has again reared its ugly head. As with the Massachusetts liquor law, the Texas abortion law delegates quintessentially governmental power to private parties — in Texas, to literally anyone on earth with an objection to abortion, giving that individual or organization the unilateral and unfettered power to inflict criminal punishment on whoever assisted a woman, within the past four years, to terminate a pregnancy without being able to prove that the fetus didn’t have detectable cardiac activity.

In the Grendel’s Den case, in which a church vetoed the restaurant’s liquor license, we sued the state functionaries charged with ultimately handing out liquor licenses or respecting whatever veto was filed. So too here in the Texas case. Anyone threatened with the prospect of paying a bounty of between $10,000 and an unlimited amount (including all attorney fees) to whoever sues them for assisting a woman to end her pregnancy — damages that don’t reflect harm to the bounty hunters and are therefore wholly punitive — could sue the court officer charged with collecting the penalty to prevent that collection from ever taking place. Nothing the Supreme Court said or did in its Sept. 1 midnight decision rules that out. And Supreme Court cases striking down punitive damages that grossly exceed any harm to the plaintiff collecting them are obviously relevant where, as here, harm to the plaintiff is zero.