Source: https://conlawincontext.com/moore-v-city-of-east-cleveland/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 10:28:46+00:00

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What precedent does the Court grapple with in Moore v. City of East Cleveland (1977)? How does it deal with it? How successful is the distinction?
Does Moore reveal any potential limitations on the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973)?
Should the liberty interest in the Due Process Clause be construed to include liberties that are less explicitly stated in the text, such as a right to birth control, abortion, or the right of a grandmother to have her grandson live with her after the death of the child’s parents?
What fundamental problems with the Court’s due process jurisprudence does Justice White suggest?
How does the Court go about judging the constitutionality of the ordinance in Moore? What method does it use to evaluate the state’s asserted purpose for the ordinance? Why does it find that the ordinance falls short?
East Cleveland’s housing ordinance, like many throughout the country, limits occupancy of a dwelling unit to members of a single family. § 1351.02. But the ordinance contains an unusual and complicated definitional section that recognizes as a “family” only a few categories of related individuals, § 1341.08. Because her family, living together in her home, fits none of those categories, appellant stands convicted of a criminal offense. The question in this case is whether the ordinance violates the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.
. . . In early 1973, Mrs. Moore received a notice of violation from the city, stating that John was an “illegal occupant” and directing her to comply with the ordinance. When she failed to remove him from her home, the city filed a criminal charge. Mrs. Moore moved to dismiss, claiming that the ordinance was constitutionally invalid on its face. Her motion was overruled, and upon conviction she was sentenced to five days in jail and a $25 fine. The Ohio Court of Appeals affirmed after giving full consideration to her constitutional claims, and the Ohio Supreme Court denied review. We noted probable jurisdiction. . . .
The city argues that our decision in Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, requires us to sustain the ordinance attacked here. Belle Terre, like East Cleveland, imposed limits on the types of groups that could occupy a single dwelling unit. Applying the constitutional standard announced in this Court’s leading land-use case, Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. (1926), we sustained the Belle Terre ordinance on the ground that it bore a rational relationship to permissible state objectives.
But one overriding factor sets this case apart from Belle Terre. The ordinance there affected only unrelated individuals. It expressly allowed all who were related by “blood, adoption, or marriage” to live together, and in sustaining the ordinance we were careful to note that it promoted “family needs” and “family values.” East Cleveland, in contrast, has chosen to regulate the occupancy of its housing by slicing deeply into the family itself. This is no mere incidental result of the ordinance. On its face it selects certain categories of relatives who may live together and declares that others may not. In particular, it makes a crime of a grandmother’s choice to live with her grandson in circumstances like those presented here.
When a city undertakes such intrusive regulation of the family, neither Belle Terre nor Euclid governs; the usual judicial deference to the legislature is inappropriate. “This Court has long recognized that freedom of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.” Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur (1974). . . . A host of cases, tracing their lineage to Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), have consistently acknowledged a “private realm of family life which the state cannot enter.” Prince v. Massachusetts (1944). See, e.g., Roe v. Wade (1973), . . . Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), . . . Poe v. Ullman (1961) (Harlan, J., dissenting), Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942). Of course, the family is not beyond regulation. See Prince v. Massachusetts. But when the government intrudes on choices concerning family living arrangements, this Court must examine carefully the importance of the governmental interests advanced and the extent to which they are served by the challenged regulation.
When thus examined, this ordinance cannot survive. The city seeks to justify it as a means of preventing overcrowding, minimizing traffic and parking congestion, and avoiding an undue financial burden on East Cleveland’s school system. Although these are legitimate goals, the ordinance before us serves them marginally, at best. For example, the ordinance permits any family consisting only of husband, wife, and unmarried children to live together, even if the family contains a half dozen licensed drivers, each with his or her own car. At the same time it forbids an adult brother and sister to share a household, even if both faithfully use public transportation. The ordinance would permit a grandmother to live with a single dependent son and children, even if his school-age children number a dozen, yet it forces Mrs. Moore to find another dwelling for her grandson John, simply because of the presence of his uncle and cousin in the same household. We need not labor the point. Section 1341.08 has but a tenuous relation to alleviation of the conditions mentioned by the city.
III. The city would distinguish the cases based on Meyer and Pierce. It points out that none of them “gives grandmothers any fundamental rights with respect to grandsons,” and suggests that any constitutional right to live together as a family extends only to the nuclear family — essentially a couple and their dependent children.
To be sure, these cases did not expressly consider the family relationship presented here. They were immediately concerned with freedom of choice with respect to childbearing, or with the rights of parents to the custody and companionship of their own children, or with traditional parental authority in matters of child rearing and education. But unless we close our eyes to the basic reasons why certain rights associated with the family have been accorded shelter under the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, we cannot avoid applying the force and rationale of these precedents to the family choice involved in this case.
Due process has not been reduced to any formula; its content cannot be determined by reference to any code. The best that can be said is that through the course of this Court’s decisions it has represented the balance which our Nation, built upon postulates of respect for the liberty of the individual, has struck between that liberty and the demands of organized society. If the supplying of content to this Constitutional concept has of necessity been a rational process, it certainly has not been one where judges have felt free to roam where unguided speculation might take them. The balance of which I speak is the balance struck by this country, having regard to what history teaches are the traditions from which it developed as well as the traditions from which it broke. That tradition is a living thing. A decision of this Court which radically departs from it could not long survive, while a decision which builds on what has survived is likely to be sound. No formula could serve as a substitute, in this area, for judgment and restraint.
[T]he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This ‘liberty’ is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints, . . . and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgment. Poe v. Ullman (dissenting opinion).
Substantive due process has at times been a treacherous field for this Court. There are risks when the judicial branch gives enhanced protection to certain substantive liberties without the guidance of the more specific provisions of the Bill of Rights. As the history of the Lochner era demonstrates, there is reason for concern lest the only limits to such judicial intervention become the predilections of those who happen at the time to be Members of this Court. That history counsels caution and restraint. But it does not counsel abandonment, nor does it require what the city urges here: cutting off any protection of family rights at the first convenient, if arbitrary boundary — the boundary of the nuclear family.
Appropriate limits on substantive due process come not from drawing arbitrary lines but rather from careful “respect for the teachings of history [and] solid recognition of the basic values that underlie our society.” Griswold v. Connecticut (Harlan, J., concurring). Our decisions establish that the Constitution protects the sanctity of the family precisely because the institution of the family is deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition. It is through the family that we inculcate and pass down many of our most cherished values, moral and cultural.
Whether or not such a household is established because of personal tragedy, the choice of relatives in this degree of kinship to live together may not lightly be denied by the State. Pierce struck down an Oregon law requiring all children to attend the State’s public schools, holding that the Constitution “excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.” . . . By the same token the Constitution prevents East Cleveland from standardizing its children and its adults by forcing all to live in certain narrowly defined family patterns.
I join the plurality’s opinion. I agree that the Constitution is not powerless to prevent East Cleveland from prosecuting as a criminal and jailing a 63-year-old grandmother for refusing to expel from her home her now 10-year-old grandson who has lived with her and been brought up by her since his mother’s death when he was less than a year old. I do not question that a municipality may constitutionally zone to alleviate noise and traffic congestion and to prevent overcrowded and unsafe living conditions, in short to enact reasonable land-use restrictions in furtherance of the legitimate objectives East Cleveland claims for its ordinance. But the zoning power is not a license for local communities to enact senseless and arbitrary restrictions which cut deeply into private areas of protected family life. East Cleveland may not constitutionally define “family” as essentially confined to parents and the parents’ own children. The plurality’s opinion conclusively demonstrates that classifying family patterns in this eccentric way is not a rational means of achieving the ends East Cleveland claims for its ordinance, and further that the ordinance unconstitutionally abridges the “freedom of personal choice in matters of . . . family life [that] is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.” Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur (1974). . . .
“If any freedom not specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights enjoys a “preferred position” in the law it is most certainly the family.” . . . [The] plurality recognizes today, that the choice of the “extended family” pattern is within the “freedom of personal choice in matters of . . . family life [that] is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.” . . .
In Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas (1974), the Court considered a New York village ordinance that restricted land use within the village to single-family dwellings. That ordinance defined “family” to include all persons related by blood, adoption, or marriage who lived and cooked together as a single-housekeeping unit; it forbade occupancy by any group of three or more persons who were not so related. We held that the ordinance was a valid effort by the village government to promote the general community welfare, and that it did not violate the 14th Amendment or infringe any other rights or freedoms protected by the Constitution.
The present case brings before us a similar ordinance of East Cleveland, Ohio, one that also limits the occupancy of any dwelling unit to a single family, but that defines “family” to include only certain combinations of blood relatives. The question presented, as I view it, is whether the decision in Belle Terre is controlling, or whether the Constitution compels a different result because East Cleveland’s definition of “family” is more restrictive than that before us in the Belle Terre case. . . .
In my view, the appellant’s claim that the ordinance in question invades constitutionally protected rights of association and privacy is in large part answered by the Belle Terre decision. The argument was made there that a municipality could not zone its land exclusively for single-family occupancy because to do so would interfere with protected rights of privacy or association. We rejected this contention, and held that the ordinance at issue “involve[d] no ‘fundamental’ right guaranteed by the Constitution, such as . . . the right of association, NAACP v. Alabama (1958); or any rights of privacy, cf. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965).” . . .
The Belle Terre decision thus disposes of the appellant’s contentions to the extent they focus not on her blood relationships with her sons and grandsons but on more general notions about the “privacy of the home.” Her suggestion that every person has a constitutional right permanently to share his residence with whomever he pleases, and that such choices are “beyond the province of legitimate governmental intrusion,” amounts to the same argument that was made and found unpersuasive in Belle Terre. . . .
The appellant [contends] . . . that the East Cleveland ordinance intrudes upon “the private realm of family life which the state cannot enter.” Prince v. Massachusetts (1944). Several decisions of the Court have identified specific aspects of what might broadly be termed “private family life” that are constitutionally protected against state interference. See, e.g., Roe v. Wade (1973) (woman’s right to decide whether to terminate pregnancy); Loving v. Virginia (1967) (freedom to marry person of another race); Griswold v. Connecticut.
Although the appellant’s desire to share a single-dwelling unit also involves “private family life” in a sense, that desire can hardly be equated with any of the interests protected in the cases just cited. The ordinance about which the appellant complains did not impede her choice to have or not to have children, and it did not dictate to her how her own children were to be nurtured and reared. The ordinance clearly does not prevent parents from living together or living with their unemancipated offspring.
But even though the Court’s previous cases are not directly in point, the appellant contends that the importance of the “extended family” in American society requires us to hold that her decision to share her residence with her grandsons may not be interfered with by the State. This decision, like the decisions involved in bearing and raising children, is said to be an aspect of “family life” also entitled to substantive protection under the Constitution. Without pausing to inquire how far under this argument an “extended family” might extend, I cannot agree. When the Court has found that the 14th Amendment placed a substantive limitation on a State’s power to regulate, it has been in those rare cases in which the personal interests at issue have been deemed “‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.'” See Roe v. Wade, quoting Palko v. Connecticut (1937). The interest that the appellant may have in permanently sharing a single kitchen and a suite of contiguous rooms with some of her relatives simply does not rise to that level. To equate this interest with the fundamental decisions to marry and to bear and raise children is to extend the limited substantive contours of the Due Process Clause beyond recognition. . . .
The 14th Amendment forbids any State to “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” . . .
This “liberty” is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints . . . and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgment.
This construction was far too open ended for Mr. Justice Black. For him, Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), as substantive due process cases, were as suspect as Lochner v. New York (1905), Coppage v. Kansas (1915), and Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923). In his view, Ferguson v. Skrupa (1963) should have finally disposed of them all. But neither Meyer nor Pierce has been overruled, and recently there have been decisions of the same genre — Roe v. Wade (1973), Loving v. Virginia (1967) [striking down a Virginia statute that banned inter-racial marriage]; Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972). . . . [A]ll [of these decisions] represented substantial reinterpretations of the Constitution.
Although the Court regularly proceeds on the assumption that the Due Process Clause has more than a procedural dimension, we must always bear in mind that the substantive content of the Clause is suggested neither by its language nor by preconstitutional history; that content is nothing more than the accumulated product of judicial interpretation of the 5th and 14th Amendments. This is not to suggest, at this point, that any of these cases should be overruled, or that the process by which they were decided was illegitimate or even unacceptable, but only to underline Mr. Justice Black’s constant reminder to his colleagues that the Court has no license to invalidate legislation which it thinks merely arbitrary or unreasonable. And no one was more sensitive than Mr. Justice Harlan to any suggestion that his approach to the Due Process Clause would lead to judges “roaming at large in the constitutional field.” Griswold v. Connecticut. No one proceeded with more caution than he did when the validity of state or federal legislation was challenged in the name of the Due Process Clause.
This is surely the preferred approach. That the Court has ample precedent for the creation of new constitutional rights should not lead it to repeat the process at will. The Judiciary, including this Court, is the most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or even the design of the Constitution. . . . [T]he Court should be extremely reluctant to breathe still further substantive content into the Due Process Clause so as to strike down legislation adopted by a State or city to promote its welfare. Whenever the Judiciary does so, it unavoidably pre-empts for itself another part of the governance of the country without express constitutional authority.
While this Court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included things have been definitely stated. Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.
As I have said, Meyer has not been overruled nor its definition of liberty rejected. The results reached in some of the cases cited by Meyer have been discarded or undermined by later cases, but those cases did not cut back the definition of liberty espoused by earlier decisions. They disagreed only, but sharply, as to the protection that was “due” the particular liberty interests involved. See, for example, West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), overruling Adkins v. Children’s Hospital. . . .
It would not be consistent with prior cases to restrict the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause to those fundamental interests “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Palko v. Connecticut (1937), from which this much-quoted phrase is taken, is not to the contrary. Palko was a criminal case, and the issue was thus not whether a protected liberty interest was at stake but what protective process was “due” that interest. The Court used the quoted standard to determine which of the protections of the Bill of Rights was due a criminal defendant in a state court within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. Nor do I think the broader view of “liberty” is inconsistent with or foreclosed by the dicta in Roe v. Wade, and Paul v. Davis (1976). These cases at most assert that only fundamental liberties will be given substantive protection; and they may be understood as merely identifying certain fundamental interests that the Court has deemed deserving of a heightened degree of protection under the Due Process Clause.
The term “liberty” is not, therefore, to be given a crabbed construction. I have no more difficulty than Mr. Justice Powell apparently does in concluding that appellant in this case properly asserts a liberty interest within the meaning of the Due Process Clause. The question is not one of liberty vel non. Rather, there being no procedural issue at stake, the issue is whether the precise interest involved the interest in having more than one set of grandchildren live in her home is entitled to such substantive protection under the Due Process Clause that this ordinance must be held invalid.
III. Looking at the doctrine of “substantive” due process as having to do with the possible invalidity of an official rule of conduct rather than of the procedures for enforcing that rule, I see the doctrine as taking several forms under the cases, each differing in the severity of review and the degree of protection offered to the individual. First, a court may merely assure itself that there is in fact a duly enacted law which proscribes the conduct sought to be prevented or sanctioned. In criminal cases, this approach is exemplified by the refusal of courts to enforce vague statutes that no reasonable person could understand as forbidding the challenged conduct. There is no such problem here.
Second is the general principle that “liberty may not be interfered with, under the guise of protecting the public interest, by legislative action which is arbitrary or without reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the State to effect.” Meyer v. Nebraska. This means-end test appears to require that any statute restrictive of liberty have an ascertainable purpose and represent a rational means to achieve that purpose, whatever the nature of the liberty interest involved. This approach was part of the substantive due process doctrine prevalent earlier in the century, and it made serious inroads on the presumption of constitutionality supposedly accorded to state and federal legislation. But with Nebbia v. New York (1934), and other cases of the 1930’s and 1940’s such as West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), the courts came to demand far less from and to accord far more deference to legislative judgments. This was particularly true with respect to legislation seeking to control or regulate the economic life of the State or Nation. Even so, “while the legislative judgment on economic and business matters is ‘well-nigh conclusive’ . . . , it is not beyond judicial inquiry.” Poe v. Ullman (Douglas, J., dissenting). No case that I know of, including Ferguson v. Skrupa (1963), has announced that there is some legislation with respect to which there no longer exists a means-ends test as a matter of substantive due process law. This is not surprising, for otherwise a protected liberty could be infringed by a law having no purpose or utility whatsoever. Of course, the current approach is to deal more gingerly with a state statute and to insist that the challenger bear the burden of demonstrating its unconstitutionality; and there is a broad category of cases in which substantive review is indeed mild and very similar to the original thought of Munn v. Illinois (1877), that “if a state of facts could exist that would justify such legislation,” it passes its initial test.
There are various “liberties,” however, which require that infringing legislation be given closer judicial scrutiny, not only with respect to existence of a purpose and the means employed, but also with respect to the importance of the purpose itself relative to the invaded interest. Some interest would appear almost impregnable to invasion, such as the freedoms of speech, press, and religion, and the freedom from cruel and unusual punishments. Other interests, for example, the right of association, the right to vote, and various claims sometimes referred to under the general rubric of the right to privacy, also weigh very heavily against state claims of authority to regulate. It is this category of interests which, as I understand it, Mr. Justice Stewart refers to as “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Because he would confine the reach of substantive due process protection to interests such as these and because he would not classify in this category the asserted right to share a house with the relatives involved here, he rejects the due process claim.
Given his premise, he is surely correct. Under our cases, the Due Process Clause extends substantial protection to various phases of family life, but none requires that the claim made here be sustained. I cannot believe that the interest in residing with more than one set of grandchildren is one that calls for any kind of heightened protection under the Due Process Clause. To say that one has a personal right to live with all, rather than some, of one’s grandchildren and that this right is implicit in ordered liberty is, as my Brother Stewart says, “to extend the limited substantive contours of the Due Process Clause beyond recognition.” The present claim is hardly one of which it could be said that “neither liberty nor justice would exist if (it) were sacrificed.” Palko v. Connecticut.
Mr. Justice Powell would apparently construe the Due Process Clause to protect from all but quite important state regulatory interests any right or privilege that in his estimate is deeply rooted in the country’s traditions. For me, this suggests a far too expansive charter for this Court. . . . What the deeply rooted traditions of the country are is arguable; which of them deserve the protection of the Due Process Clause is even more debatable. The suggested view would broaden enormously the horizons of the Clause; and, if the interest involved here is any measure of what the States would be forbidden to regulate, the courts would be substantively weighing and very likely invalidating a wide range of measures that Congress and state legislatures think appropriate to respond to a changing economic and social order.
Mrs. Moore’s interest in having the offspring of more than one dependent son live with her qualifies as a liberty protected by the Due Process Clause; but, because of the nature of that particular interest, the demands of the Clause are satisfied once the Court is assured that the challenged proscription is the product of a duly enacted or promulgated statute, ordinance, or regulation and that it is not wholly lacking in purpose or utility. . . .
The Court revisited the issue of grandparents’ rights in Troxel v. Granville (2000). In a plurality decision, the Court struck down a Washington statute that allowed third parties (often grandparents) to gain visitation with children, even over the objection of a fit parent, if it were in the best interest of the child. The Court was concerned about the overbreadth of the statute, which seemed not to give appropriate deference to a parent’s right to raise a child. While the various opinions were fragmented, a majority of the Court appeared to continue to recognize a fundamental right in parents to raise their children and a liberty interest in grandparents to have contact with their grandchildren.
(a) Husband or wife of the nominal head of the household. (b) Unmarried children of the nominal head of the household or of the spouse of the nominal head of the household, provided, however, that such unmarried children have no children residing with them. (c) Father or mother of the nominal head of the household or of the spouse of the nominal head of the household. (d) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (b) hereof, a family may include not more than one dependent married or unmarried child of the nominal head of the household or of the spouse of the nominal head of the household and the spouse and dependent children of such dependent child. For the purpose of this subsection, a dependent person is one who has more than fifty percent of his total support furnished for him by the nominal head of the household and the spouse of the nominal head of the household. (e) A family may consist of one individual.

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