In Re Gene N. Chavez

Petitioner Gene N. Chavez, a New Mexico attorney, was suspended from the practice of law by order of the Supreme Court of New Mexico entered June 5, 2026 — an interim suspension “pending further proceedings before the Disciplinary Board.” No tribunal has ever found that Mr. Chavez committed misconduct. No petition for interim suspension was ever filed or served; no hearing on suspension was ever noticed or held; no finding was made that his continued practice posed any probability of harm to the public — the showing New Mexico's own Rule 17-207(A)(1)(e) NMRA requires; and no prompt post-deprivation hearing has been provided or scheduled. The order's recitals identify as its bases the parties' conditional consent agreement, the stipulated disciplinary history, and the argument at a hearing held solely to consider that agreement — the very materials Rule 17-211(C) NMRA withdraws and declares “cannot be used against the attorney or disciplinary counsel in any subsequent disciplinary proceedings or in any other judicial proceeding” once a conditional consent disposition fails. The questions presented are:

1. Whether the interim suspension of an attorney's license to practice law — a protected interest, Schware v. Board of Bar Examiners of New Mexico, 353 U.S. 232 (1957), deprived in a proceeding this Court has described as quasicriminal, In re Ruffalo, 390 U.S. 544 (1968) — without notice, petition, or hearing, without any finding of probable misconduct or of harm to the public, and without any prompt post- deprivation hearing, violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as construed in Barry v. Barchi, 443 U.S. 55 (1979).

2. Whether due process is violated where a state's highest court rests an attorney's suspension exclusively on admissions, stipulations, and consent-hearing presentations that the state's own rules withdraw and prohibit from any use upon the failure of a conditional consent disposition, and imposes that suspension immediately after the attorney exercises his express rule-conferred right to decline a modification to the proposed consent disposition.

3. Whether, under Ex parte Bradley, 74 U.S. (7 Wall.) 364 (1868), a writ of mandamus or prohibition should issue where a court has suspended an attorney in excess of the authority its own rules confer, the constitutional deprivation is operative now, rehearing has been denied without findings, and — by operation of sovereign immunity, the 1996 amendment to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, Younger abstention, and the Rooker-Feldman doctrine — no other court in the United States can grant relief.