Arizona law does not permit the state to require an employee to undergo training that presents blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex. The wording is not obscure. It addresses the state and its subdivisions, identifies the protected employees, and forbids a particular act. Yet when I sought to enforce that prohibition against Arizona State University for required DEI training, the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) maintained that I had no right to be in court. The legislature may have enacted a command, its argument runs, but it gave the people protected by that command no means of enforcing it.

I have taught philosophy and religious studies at Arizona State University for more than two decades. In 2022, ASU began requiring its employees to complete an online program called “Inclusive Communities.” Arizona had enacted A.R.S. § 41-1494 the previous year. The statute provides that the state and specified political subdivisions “may not require an employee to engage in training, orientation or therapy that presents any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex.” It separately forbids spending public money on such programs.

The complaint filed on my behalf by the Goldwater Institute detailed the contents of the training and its accompanying quiz questions. It advanced contested claims about race, privilege, and sexuality as authoritative conclusions. Its treatment of “whiteness” assigned moral guilt according to racial membership, while its treatment of sexuality cast biblical Christian beliefs about morality as impediments to inclusion. Employees had to complete the lesson and provide the approved answers for the quiz.

I sued the ABOR for declaratory and injunctive relief. I did not ask for damages—instead, I asked a court to declare whether a public university had violated the legislature’s command and to stop the violation. The superior court held that § 41-1494 implied a private right of action for employees subjected to forbidden training. The court of appeals reversed. Because the statute contains no clause expressly authorizing an employee to sue, it concluded that I could not enforce it. The Arizona Supreme Court granted review on a precise question: Did the court of appeals err by failing to apply the factors set out in Transamerica Financial Corp. v. Superior Court?

The distinction between standing and a private right of action matters, as does the distinction between an express and an implied right of action. Standing asks whether a litigant has a sufficient personal stake in the controversy; a private right of action asks whether the law authorizes that person to seek judicial enforcement. Such authorization is express when the statute states that an injured person may sue. It is implied when that authorization must be inferred from the statute’s language, context, purpose, and remedial structure. Everyone agrees that § 41-1494 contains no express right of action. My case turns on whether it implies one.

The Arizona Supreme Court answered that question in Transamerica in 1988. There the court declined to adopt the restrictive federal approach. It examined “the context of the statutes, the language used, the subject matter, the effects and consequences, and the spirit and purpose of the law.” The analysis asks who is protected, what duty the statute creates, what remedies are available, and what consequences follow if courts refuse to recognize one.

Those considerations fit § 41-1494 naturally. The legislature identified a discrete protected class: public employees required to undergo proscribed training. It imposed a mandatory prohibition on state entities. The employee bears the injury, and an injunction is the remedy tailored to it. The statute requires compliance reports, but a report to political officials neither adjudicates an employee’s claim nor stops unlawful training. A report about compliance is not a remedy for noncompliance.

At oral argument, Justice Clint Bolick placed the dispute in the larger American legal tradition. He invoked the maxim ubi jus ibi remedium: where there is a right, there is a remedy. Chief Justice Ann Timmer asked counsel for the board whether that principle should not apply in Arizona. The maxim expresses something very basic about the rule of law. A right that public officials may violate without judicial redress is not fully a right. It is advice addressed to the government, enforceable only if the government wishes to heed it.

The lineage runs through Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison. The case is remembered for judicial review, but Marshall’s reasoning begins with the relation between rights and remedies. He called it “a general and indisputable rule” that where there is a legal right, there is also a legal remedy when that right is invaded. The judicial duty to say what the law is arises because law governs officials as well as citizens.

That principle sharpened the separation-of-powers exchange at our argument. Chief Justice Timmer asked whether recognizing an implied action risks transferring legislative power to judges. Courts must not manufacture causes of action whenever they approve a statute’s purpose. But my lawyer, Jonathan Riches of the Goldwater Institute, answered that our position preserves, rather than disturbs, the division of powers. The legislature enacted a prohibition. If courts hold that the law supplies neither an express nor an implied means of enforcement for the people it protects, judges have not modestly deferred to the legislature but have instead rendered its command practically unenforceable—and thereby nullified it in the cases that matter most.

The chief justice pressed the point from the other direction. The legislature is presumed to know Arizona law, including Transamerica. Might lawmakers have omitted an express cause of action because they legislated against the background rule that an appropriate remedy could be implied? Thankfully, an amicus brief from the Arizona speaker and the Arizona Senate president at the time of the law’s passing states that they certainly intended it to provide an implied right of action for employees like me. Under Transamerica, statutory silence begins an inquiry; it does not end one. To treat the omission of explicit language creating a right of action as conclusive would replace Arizona’s settled multifactor analysis with the federal rule Arizona expressly rejected.

The board’s position also creates a peculiar asymmetry. It holds that the law allows only for a report about potential violations to be submitted to ABOR. The government would be both the regulated party and, in effect, the final judge of its own compliance. Periodic reporting may inform the board, the governor, and legislative leaders, but political oversight cannot substitute for the judicial remedy owed to a person presently subjected to unlawful state action.

My case concerns one university program, but its consequences will extend far beyond DEI training. Arizona enacts many statutes that establish duties and protect persons without appending a sentence expressly authorizing suit. The court’s decision will tell legislators how they must write future laws, lower courts how they must interpret existing law, and citizens whether statutory rights may be judicially vindicated. It will also decide whether Transamerica remains the law in Arizona or survives only as a citation whose method courts need not use.

The question is therefore whether the justices should give legal effect to a prohibition the legislature actually enacted, using the interpretive rule Arizona already recognizes. The separation of powers does not require courts to stand aside while an executive agency effectively treats a statute as optional. It requires each branch to perform its own office: the legislature writes the law, the executive obeys it, and the judiciary supplies judgment when a concrete violation is alleged.

Ubi jus ibi remedium is a warning against a government without accountability. If Arizona recognizes a right of public employees to be free from compulsory race-based blame and judgment yet closes the courthouse door when that right is invaded, the statute will retain its words while losing its force. Arizona’s public universities will be emboldened to teach their DEI curriculum without meaningful oversight under Arizona law. The court now must decide whether the legislature enacted a law or merely expressed a hope.