Opinion ID: 1885183
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 17

Heading: False Distinction Between Liability Phase and Remedy Phase

Text: The circuit court's March 31, 1993, order and its subsequent orders provided injunctive remedies. It is clear that the court and the parties contemplated that there would be a series of successive orders providing further relief. Those orders entailed the extensive and intrusive exercise by the trial judge of legislative and executive powers, in violation of the Alabama Constitution. The plaintiffs' argument that the March 31, 1993, order was final, and therefore appealable, is predicated on a distinction between a liability phase and a remedy phase. The March 31, 1993, order, insofar as it has been referred to as a Liability Order is misnamed. The Liability Order contains declaratory and injunctive remedies. It also imposed a partial (though vague and incomprehensible) remedy, which was in fact not a legal remedyit was a political decree. My belief that the March 31, 1993, order is not final, and therefore not appealable, is based only in part on the fact that it included a partial remedy. The flaw is more fundamental than the fact that there was a mixture of liability and remedy in the same order or that the remedy was incomplete. The distinction made in this case between a liability phase and a remedy phase is an artificial distinction borrowed from traditional lawsuits and imposed on this type of public-interest litigation. In a public-interest lawsuit, the liability and the remedy are coterminous, i.e., they have the same or coincident boundaries and are coextensive in scope or duration. [40] It would be impossible to separate the trial into conceptually distinct liability and remedy phases. An Equity Funding Case is not like a traditional negligence action. In a traditional lawsuit the determination as to whether a defendant has breached the duty of care (i.e., liability) is conceptually distinct from, and can be determined without any determination as to, the amount of recovery available (i.e., remedy). It is not necessary to determine the amount of damages in order to determine whether there was a breach of duty. However, even in the traditional lawsuit, the liability determination is not a final judgment. How much more is that the case here? There is an even more fundamental problem with the Equity Funding Case. The liability and the remedy are not analytically distinct. It is impossible to know that an education system is deficient (i.e., that there is liability) unless the judge has determined that a constitutional right to an education requires a certain quality of education (i.e., a remedy). For example, a court could not have known that teachers are not being paid an adequate salary (liability) unless the court had already determined what the Constitution requires as to teacher's salaries (remedy). The March 31, 1993, order simply asserts that the present education system is unconstitutional. The court did not at that time tell the defendants what to do to fix the lack of equity in the education system. If the constitution does not quantify a standard, then a court may not simply make one up. The defendants and others were told to fix the problem and then to check back with the court to determine whether they had fixed the problem to the judge's satisfaction. If they did not respond correctly the first time, they would have to try again. The circuit court found that the defendants had breached an unknown, and unknowable, standard. In this case, the circuit court itself apparently did not know what the law requires because it reserved the complete remedy for a future determination. The circuit court found itself in this intractable position because it adopted the fundamentally false proposition that every dispute involving a constitutional provision is subject to judicial resolution. The judgments involved in making educational decisions are fundamentally political in nature; therefore, they have been properly delegated to the executive and legislative branches of government. They are not fundamentally political in nature simply because they involve a public controversy. They are fundamentally political in nature because of the reasoning process involved in making such decisions. [41] The Alabama Constitution makes clear that the power to establish a system of public schools is delegated to the Legislature. This is true of both Amendment 111, which amended § 256 of the Constitution, and of § 256 itself. It is universally recognized that a Legislature makes laws that are in the public interest or common good. Assuming that there is a public interest or common good that can be identified or agreed upon, the lawmaker determines, within the bounds of law, the best or most efficient legislative means to correct a social evil. The Legislature may attempt to justify the legislative means in one of two ways. First, it may justify a piece of legislation as an enactment or a particularization of something that is inherently right. In this instance, the lawmaker need not engage in a utilitarian calculation of whether a particular law will or will not promote the common good. The operative assumption is that doing the right thing necessarily advances the common good. This truth is encapsulated in the maxim, honesty is the best policy. It presumes the existence of a moral order that man can know and that man has the authority, at least in some limited way, to promote through positive law. The second method of legislative decision-making involves something different from the direct implementation of basic moral postulates. Where there is no necessary right or wrong, the lawmaker must determine the most efficient way of achieving a particular end. The Legislature must project the outcome of alternative courses of action into the future. It may do so in a rather informal way by acting upon its common or collective experience. Ideally, at other times it will proceed with great deliberation, systematically and comprehensively collecting data, conducting hearings, calling upon experts, and reviewing studies to calculate the relative costs and benefits of various courses of action. It is the cost-benefit utilitarian methodology that is most distinctly political, as opposed to judicial, in nature. The Legislature faces difficulties in making law by balancing interests or engaging in cost-benefit analyses. Those difficulties are further exacerbated when a court, designed to conduct a very different kind of evidentiary inquiry than that of a legislative body, assumes the legislative mantle. The political methodology involved in law-making requires an entirely different approach than a judicial methodology. A legislative body, in making law, collects a wide range of information. It is forward-looking, because it gathers historic information with a view to accomplishing some future or ongoing goal of improving society. The end of the fact-gathering process is to develop a rule of law that courts can apply to the facts of particular cases. A court does not envision a future social goal and order the Legislature to conform to its vision of the future; that would be turning the constitutional system on its head and making the legislative branch dependent upon the judges instead of upon the voters the legislators represent. The executive branch, as a political branch, makes decisions using essentially the same methodology as the legislative branch. Its discretion is limited not only by inherent standards of right and wrong and by the constitution but also by statutes passed by the Legislature. The executive branch makes utilitarian cost-benefit decisions as to the most efficient means of enforcing the law. For example, a prosecutor has discretion to decide the best way to enforce the law. He has discretion as to whom he will prosecute and for what crimes. Those decisions are not reviewable by a court unless the prosecutor is breaking the law in doing so. The courts have no jurisdiction over the political branches of the government unless those branches break some provision of the law. Courts do not have the authority to review legislative or executive discretion, no matter how unwise or inefficient or even unfair they think the exercise of that discretion may be. `[Q]uestions of propriety, wisdom, necessity, utility, and expediency are held exclusively for the legislative bodies, and are matters with which the courts have no concern. This principle is embraced within the simple statement that the only question for the court to decide is one of power, not of expediency or wisdom.' Densmore v. Jefferson County, 813 So.2d 844, 850 (Ala.2001) (quoting City of Orange Beach v. Duggan, 788 So.2d 146, 151 (Ala. 2000), quoting in turn Alabama State Federation of Labor v. McAdory, 246 Ala. 1, 9-10, 18 So.2d 810, 815 (1944)). [I]t is not the duty of this Court to question the wisdom, or the lack thereof, used by the Legislature in enacting the laws of this State. Ex parte T.D.T., 745 So.2d 899, 904 (Ala.1999). It scarcely need be said that the matter of policy is one for the Legislature, and whether wise or unwise is of no concern to the courts. We are called upon to determine the question of legislative power, and that alone. State ex rel. Wilkinson v. Murphy, 237 Ala. 332, 342, 186 So. 487, 497 (1939). The Constitution provides for review of such political judgments. It is called an election. The orders that the Montgomery Circuit Court issued and that provided injunctive relief represented the exercise of wide-ranging executive and legislative powers. Those orders infringed upon the powers of the other branches of State government. It may be that the Alabama education system could be better funded and operated. Obviously, there is frustration in various sectors of Alabama with alleged inaction in this area by the Alabama Legislature. But such frustration in a portion of this State is no reason for this Court or for executive officers or even for the Legislature (which may wish to shirk the responsibility of making hard choices) to allow one circuit court judge in Montgomery County to take upon himself or herself such immenseand unconstitutionalauthority. Based on the remedies imposed in the various orders, including the March 31, 1993, order, the circuit court has engaged in a far-reaching exercise of legislative and executive powers in violation of the Alabama Constitution. And as discussed above, the remedies in a case of this nature are too intertwined with liability to separate them. Because the Liability Phase cannot be distinguished from the Remedy Phase in an Equity Funding Case, the position that the attorney general has taken is as untenable as that taken by the plaintiffs. The attorney general has argued that the circuit court had jurisdiction to find that the State failed to provide a system of public education that complied with the Alabama Constitution, but that the circuit court had no jurisdiction to issue a remedy, and, if it did have such jurisdiction, the State was now in compliance. Because of the peculiar nature of this litigation, it is impossible to determine liability without also determining the remedy. The remedy determination is inherently political in nature. This Court has no more jurisdiction to determine whether the education system complies with whatever requirements can be divined from the word liberal in § 256 of the Alabama Constitution than do the trial courts. That is a political judgment not subject to judicial review. The laws the Legislature passes are subject to adjudication only if they violate the Constitution, and the manner in which the executive branch implements those laws is subject to adjudication only if in implementing the law that branch breaches a rule of law set down by the Legislature, not a standard of efficiency determined by a judge. There is no discretion on the part of those branches to break the law, and if an officer acts illegally he may be held criminally or civilly liable.