Source: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gardner_v._Toilet_Goods_Association,_Inc./Dissent_Fortas
Timestamp: 2015-04-02 08:09:16
Document Index: 470464510

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 321', '§ 8', '§ 301', '§ 331', '§ 302', '§ 332', '§ 304', '§ 334', '§ 303', '§ 333', '§ 701', '§ 371', '§ 701', '§ 701', '§ 701', '§ 376', '§ 701', '§ 701', '§ 701']

Gardner v. Toilet Goods Association, Inc./Dissent Fortas - Wikisource, the free online library
Gardner v. Toilet Goods Association, Inc./Dissent Fortas
< Gardner v. Toilet Goods Association, Inc.
Gardner v. Toilet Goods Association, Inc. by Abe Fortas
930820Gardner v. Toilet Goods Association, Inc. — DissentAbe Fortas
GARDNER v. TOILET GOODS ASSOCIATION, INC.
Argued: May 22, 1967, May 29, 1967. ---
I am in agreement with the Court in No. 336, Toilet Goods Assn. v. Gardner, 387 U.S. 158, 87 S.Ct. 1520, 18 L.Ed.2d 697, that we should affirm the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit holding that the authority of the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to promulgate the regulation there involved may not be challenged by injunctive or declaratory judgment action. The regulation (hereinafter referred to as the 'access' regulation) was issued under the 1960 Color Additive Amendments to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. 74 Stat. 397, 21 U.S.C. §§ 321-376. It requires that manufacturers afford employees of the agency access to all manufacturing facilities, processes, and formulae involved in the manufacture of color additives and intermediates, and provides that the Commissioner of Food and Drugs 'may immediately suspend certification service' so long as access is denied. 28 Fed.Reg. 6446, 21 CFR § 8.28.
With all respect, I submit that established principles of jurisprudence, solidly rooted in the constitutional structure of our Government, require that the courts should not intervene in the administrative process at this stage, under these facts and in this gross, shotgun fashion. With all respect, I submit that the governing principles of law do not permit a different result in these cases than in No. 336. In none of these cases is judicial interference warranted at this stage, in this fashion, and to test-on a gross, free-wheeling basis-whether the content of these regulations is within the statutory intendment. The contrary is dictated by a proper regard for the purpose of the regulatory statute and the requirements of effective administration; and by regard for the salutary rule that courts should pass upon concrete, specific questions in a particularized setting rather than upon a general controversy divorced from particular facts.
The Court, by today's decisions in Nos. 39 and 438, has opened Pandora's box. Federal injunctions will now threaten programs of vast importance to the public welfare. The Court's holding here strikes at progras for the public health. The dangerous precedent goes even further. It is cold comfort-it is little more than delusion-to read in the Court's opinion that 'It is scarcely to be doubted that a court would refuse to postpone the effective date of an agency action if the Government could show * * * that delay would be detrimental to the public health or safety.' Experience dictates, on the contrary, that it can hardly be hoped that some federal judge somewhere will not be moved as the Court is here, by the cries of anguish and distress of those regulated, to grant a disruptive injunction.
The difference between the majority and me in these cases is not with respect to the existence of jurisdiction to enjoin, but to the definition of occasions on which such jurisdiction may be invoked. I do not doubt that there is residual judicial power in some extreme and limited situations to enjoin administrative actions even in the absence of specific statutory provision where the agency has acted unconstitutionally or without jurisdiction-as distinguished from an allegedly erroneous action. But the Court's opinions in No. 39 and No. 438 appear to proceed on the principle that, even where no constitutional issues or questions of administrative jurisdiction or of arbitrary procedure are involved, exercise of judicial power to enjoin allegedly erroneous regulatory action is permissible unless Congress has explicitly prohibited it, provided only that the controversy is 'ripe' for judicial determination. This is a rule that is novel in its breadth and destructive in its implications as illustrated by the present application. As will appear, I believe that this approach improperly and unwisely gives individual federal district judges a roving commission to halt the regulatory process, and to do so on the basis of abstractions and generalities instead of concrete fact situations, and that it impermissibly broadens the license of the courts to intervene in administrative action by means of a threshold suit for injunction rather than by the method provided by statute.
The Administrative Procedure Act [1] and fundamental principles of our jurisprudence [2] insist that there must be some type of effective judicial review of final, substantive agency action which seriously affects personal or property rights. But, '(a)ll constitutional questions aside, it is for Congress to determine how the rights which it creates shall be enforced. * * * In such a case the specification of one remedy normally excludes another.' Switchmen's Union of North America v. National Mediation Board, 320 U.S. 297, 301, 64 S.Ct. 95, 97, 88 L.Ed. 61 (1943). Where Congress has provided a method of review, the requisite showing to induce the courts otherwise to bring a governmental program to a halt may not be made by a mere showing of the impact of the regulation and the customary hardships of interim compliance. At least in cases where the claim is of erroneous action rather than the lack of jurisdiction or denial of procedural due process, a suit for injunctive or declaratory relief will not lie absent a clear demonstration that the type of review available under the statute would not be 'adequate,' that the controversies are otherwise 'ripe' for judicial decision, and that no public interest exists which offsets the private values which the litigation seeks to vindicate. As I shall discuss, no such showing is or can be made here.
Since enactment of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1938, the mechanism for judicial review of agency actions under its provisions has been well understood. Except for specific types of agency regulations ad actions to which I shall refer, judicial review has been confined to enforcement actions instituted by the Attorney General on recommendation of the agency. As the recurrent debate over this technique demonstrates, this restricted avenue for challenge has been deemed necessary because of the direct and urgent relationship of the field of regulation to the public health. [3] It is this avenue that applies with respect to the regulations at issue in the present cases.
The scheme of the Act, in this respect, is as follows: 'Prohibited acts' are listed in § 301, 52 Stat. 1042, as amended, 21 U.S.C. § 331. Subsequent sections authorize the Attorney General to institute three types of proceedings. First, under § 302, 52 Stat. 1043, as amended, 21 U.S.C. § 332, he may apply to the district courts of the United States for injunctive relief. If an injunction is violated, jury trial is assured on demand of the accused. Second, under § 304, 52 Stat. 1044, as amended, 21 U.S.C. § 334, the Attorney General may institute libel proceedings in the district courts and seek orders for seizure of any misbranded or adulterated food, drug, device, or cosmetic. Third, criminal prosecution is authorized for violations, but before the Secretary may report a violation to the Attorney General for criminal prosecution, he must afford the affected person an opportunity to present his views. §§ 303, 305, 52 Stat. 1043, 1045, as amended, 21 U.S.C. §§ 333, 335.
The present regulations concededly would be reviewable in the course of any of the above proceedings. Apart from these general provisions, the Act contains specific provisions for administrative hearing and review in the courts of appeals with respect to regulations issued under certain, enumerated provisions of the Act-not including those here involved. These appear in § 701(f) of the Act, 52 Stat. 1055, as amended, 21 U.S.C. § 371(f). Section 701, by subdivision (a), contains the Secretary's general authority, exercised in the present cases, to promulgate 'regulations for the efficient enforcement of (the Act).' Subdivisions (e) and (f) provide for public hearings, administrative findings, and judicial review in a court of appeals with respect to those regulations specifically enumerated in subsection (e). [4] The Court agrees that this procedure applies only to the enumerated types of regulations and that the present regulations are unaffected. Then, as to the enumerated regulations which are subject to judicial review-and only as to them-subparagraph (6) of subsection (f) specifies that '(t)he remedies provided for in this subsection shall be in addition to and not in substitution for any other remedies provided by law.' This 'saving clause' does not apply or refer to regulations other than those enumerated, and the Court's argument to the contrary is inconsistent with the clear wording and placement of the clause. [5]
At various times, § 701 has been amended to include types of regulations in addition to those initially subjected to § 701(f). Indeed, in the congressional action which included enactment of statutory provisions here in issue, the 1960 Color Additive Amendments, 74 Stat. 397, Congress amended § 701(e), 21 U.S.C. § 376(e) to include certain of the regulations authorized by the Color Additive Amendments. But, significantly, these did not include the regulations at issue in No. 336 and No. 438. The same is true with respect to the later Drug Amendments of 1962, 76 Stat. 780. Subsection (e) was again enlarged, but the provision involved in No. 39 was not included. These actions were taken in the course of vigorous debate as to the enforcement and review provisions which should be enacted with respect to the 1960 and 1962 amendments.
On a number of occasions Congress considered and rejected the proposal that district courts be given power to restrain by injunction the enforcement of regulations. [6] The bill that became law in 1938 originally contained provisions for hearings and judicial review in the district courts of certain specified types of regulations (substantially those later enacted as § 701, supra). District courts were also empowered to enjoin 'any regulation promulgated in accordance with section 24' (which would include the regulations at issue in these cases, promulgated under § 701(a)). S. 5, 75th Cong., 1st Sess. (1937). The House Committee eliminated the latter provision and substituted what became subsection (f). This draft authorized review in a district court of regulations under subsection (e) and of those orders only. [7] Even this restricted provision for enjoining certain regulations met with bitter opposition because it 'would postpone indefinitely the consumer protection' or would 'hamstring' the Act's enforcement and 'amount to a practical nullification * * * of the bill.' [8] The Conference Committee then drafted the bill which was enacted, including the House revision of the review provision which became § 701 except for a significant change: So concerned was the Congress lest the administration of the law should be subjected to judicial intervention that even with respect to th § pecified regulations in subsection (e) the reviewing power was placed in the courts of appeals rather than in the district courts. [9] This was to meet the criticism that 'a single district judge could be found who would issue an injunction.' But this is exactly what the Court today decrees. Rejected along with the original House proposal was the suggestion from the Department of Justice, set out at 83 Cong.Rec. 7892 (1938), that the Congress should leave review in the hands of the district courts' traditional injunctive powers-although the Court today resuscitates that lost cause, too.
As this Court held in Ewing v. Mytinger & Casselberry, 339 U.S. 594, 600-601, 70 S.Ct. 870, 873, 94 L.Ed. 1088 (1950), 'This highly selective manner in which Congress has provided (in this Act) for judicial review reinforces the inference that the only review of the issue of probable cause (for seizure) * * * was the one provided in the libel suit.' In evaluating the destructive force and effect of the Court's action in these cases, it is necessary to realize that it is arming each of the federal district judges in this Nation with power to enjoin enforcement of regulations and actions under the federal law designed to protect the people of this Nation against dangerous drugs and cosmetics. Restraining orders and temporary injunctions will suspend application of these public safety laws pending years of litigation-a time schedule which these cases illustrate. [10] They are disruptive enough, regardless of the ultimate outcome. The Court's validation of this shotgun attack upon this vital law and its administration is not confined to these suits, these regulations, or these plaintiffs-or even this statute. It is a general hunting license; and I respectfully submit, a license for mischief because it authorizes aggression which is richly rewarded by delay in the subjection of private interests to programs which Congress believes to be required in the public interest. As I read the Court's opinion, it does not seriously contend that Congress authorized or contemplated this type of relief. It does not rest upon the argument that Congress intended that injunctions or threshold relief should be available. The Court seems to announce a doctrine, which is new and startling in administrative law, that the courts, in determining whether to exercise jurisdiction by injunction, will not look to see whether Congress intended that the parties should resort to another avenue of review, but will be governed by whether Congress has 'prohibited' injunctive relief. The Court holds that 'judicial review of a final agency action by an aggrieved person will not be cut off unless there is persuasive reason to believe that such was the purpose of Congress.' As authority for this, the Court produces little support. Board of Governors of Federal Reserve System v. Agnew, 329 U.S. 441, 67 S.Ct. 411, 91 L.Ed. 408 (1947), involved removal from office of certain bank directors. Had the Court not authorized review, the aggrieved individuals could only test the correctness of the administrator's decision by ignoring it and risking a prison term of five years. No evidence of congressional hostility to review was adduced. [11] Heikkila v. Barb