Opinion ID: 186000
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Court Monitor

Text: 44 Kieffer was appointed Court Monitor on April 16, 2001, with the consent of the parties, for a term of one year. In April 2002 the Government objected to Kieffer's reappointment unless certain conditions were placed upon the scope of his powers. On April 15, 2002, the district court reappointed him without regard to one of those conditions. The Department claims this was a clear error. We agree. 45 The district court claimed authority to appoint the Monitor in the first instance based upon the consent of the [parties], and ... the Court's inherent powers. The Government claims it did not consent to Kieffer's reappointment, however, and neither the district court nor the plaintiffs point to any case or other authority suggesting a district court has inherent power to appoint a court monitor. Indeed, in their brief the plaintiffs, tellingly, do not address the Department's argument that the district court could not appoint a court monitor over its objection. At oral argument the plaintiffs instead rested upon the assertion that the DOI's consent to Kieffer's original appointment as Court Monitor was temporally unlimited and irrevocable. 46 The plaintiffs' position is untenable on the facts of this case. First, the district court did not propose or purport to appoint Kieffer permanently, so the DOI had no occasion to consent to his having an unlimited tenure. As we noted earlier, the order appointing him stated that Kieffer would serve for at least 1 year from this date. Upon order of the Court, after comment or objection thereto by the parties, his term of service may be extended for additional terms. The plaintiffs' suggestion that this order, which explicitly grants the parties the right to object to Kieffer's reappointment, actually served as consent to his unlimited tenure, is absurd. We conclude the Department effectively withheld its consent to the court's reappointment of Kieffer as Monitor, which brings us to the question whether the district court has inherent power to appoint a monitor without the consent of the party to be monitored. 47 A judicial claim to an inherent power is not to be indulged lightly, lest it excuse overreaching [t]he judicial Power actually granted to federal courts by Article III of the Constitution of the United States, and the customs and usages that inform the meaning of that phrase. Such a claim, therefore, must either be documented by historical practice, see, e.g., Miner v. Atlass, 363 U.S. 641, 643-44, 80 S.Ct. 1300, 1302-03, 4 L.Ed.2d 1462 (1960) (rejecting contention that federal court sitting in admiralty has inherent power to order taking of depositions for discovery because there was no historical record of courts ordering such depositions); Link v. Wabash R.R. Co., 370 U.S. 626, 629-30, 631, 82 S.Ct. 1386, 1388-89, 1389, 8 L.Ed.2d 734 (1962) (noting court's inherent power to dismiss suit for failure to prosecute dates to Blackstone's Commentaries and has long gone unquestioned), or supported by an irrefutable showing that the exercise of an undoubted authority would otherwise be set to naught. See, e.g., Chambers v. NASCO, 501 U.S. 32, 43, 111 S.Ct. 2123, 2132, 115 L.Ed.2d 27 (1991) (It has long been understood that certain implied powers must necessarily result to our Courts of justice from the nature of their institution, powers which cannot be dispensed with in a Court, because they are necessary to the exercise of all others); cf. All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1651(a) (granting federal courts power to issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law). Often the two go hand in hand. See, e.g., Fisher v. Pace, 336 U.S. 155, 159, 69 S.Ct. 425, 427, 93 L.Ed. 569 (1949) (Historically and rationally the inherent power of courts to punish contempts in the face of the court without further proof of facts and without aid of jury is not open to question. This attribute of courts is essential to preserve their authority and to prevent the administration of justice from falling into disrepute). In this case, however, we find nothing but the district court's assertion it has inherent power to appoint a monitor, which can hardly be self-supporting. Therefore, we hold the district court does not have inherent power to appoint a monitor — at least not a monitor with the extensive duties the court assigned to Kieffer — over a party's substantial objection, here the Government's objection that the appointment violated the separation of powers. As the foregoing sentence conveys, our holding is a narrow one, tethered to the peculiar facts recounted below. 48 In this case the Court Monitor was charged to monitor and review all of the Interior defendants' trust reform activities and to report to the district court on any ... matter [he] deem[ed] pertinent to trust reform. The court authorized the Monitor to engage in ex parte communications, and required the DOI to facilitate and assist the Monitor, to provide [him] with access to any ... offices or employees to gather information, and to pay his hourly fees and expenses. In short, the Monitor acted as an internal investigator, not unlike a departmental Inspector General except that he reported not to the Secretary but to the district court. 49 Although the Department initially consented to this arrangement, after a year's experience it conditioned its renewed consent upon a narrower and more specific definition of the Monitor's role: The DOI sought to limit the scope of the Monitor's investigation to steps taken by the Department to rectify the breaches of trust declared by the Court or steps taken that would necessarily delay rather than accelerate the ultimate provision of an adequate accounting. It later augmented its objection to the Monitor's role, arguing that the Monitor's broad-ranging investigation interfered with the Department's deliberative process privilege under Hinckley v. United States, 140 F.3d 277, 284-85 (D.C.Cir.1998) (describing privilege as protecting materials that are both predecisional and deliberative); see also Morgan v. United States, 304 U.S. 1, 18, 58 S.Ct. 773, 776, 82 L.Ed. 1129 (1938) ([I]t was not the function of the court to probe the mental processes of the Secretary in reaching his conclusions if he [did what] the law required), and that the Monitor otherwise intruded unduly into the function of the Executive Branch. We need not decide, however, whether the Department's objection was meritorious; it is enough for present purposes that the objection was colorable. 50 Regardless whether the district court has any inherent authority to appoint an agent to monitor the conduct of a party in litigation before it, it was surely impermissible to invest the Court Monitor with wide-ranging extrajudicial duties over the Government's objection. The Monitor's portfolio was truly extraordinary; instead of resolving disputes brought to him by the parties, he became something like a party himself. The Monitor was charged with an investigative, quasi-inquisitorial, quasi-prosecutorial role that is unknown to our adversarial legal system. When the parties consent to such an arrangement, we have no occasion to inject ourselves into their affairs. When a party has for a nonfrivolous reason denied its consent, however, the district court must confine itself (and its agents) to its accustomed judicial role. 51 Although the plaintiffs did not bring it to our attention, we are aware of the practice of a federal district court appointing a special master pursuant to Rule 53 to supervise implementation of a court order, especially a remedial order requiring major structural reform of a state institution. See, e.g., Ruiz v. Estelle, 679 F.2d 1115, 1161-62 (5th Cir.) (prison reform), amended in part, reh'g denied in part on other grounds, 688 F.2d 266 (5th Cir.1982); Halderman v. Pennhurst State Sch. & Hosp., 612 F.2d 84, 111 (3d Cir.1979) (en banc) (reform of institution for the mentally retarded), rev'd on other grounds, 451 U.S. 1, 101 S.Ct. 1531, 67 L.Ed.2d 694 (1981); Gary W. v. State of Louisiana, 601 F.2d 240, 244-45 (5th Cir.1979) (same); id. (collecting cases); Ross Sandler & David Schoenbrod, Democracy by Decree 55-57 (2003). Putting aside the question whether those cases shed any light whatsoever upon the propriety of a federal court authorizing its agent to interfere with the affairs of another branch of the federal government, we think the present case goes far beyond the practice that has grown up under Rule 53. 52 Ruiz illustrates the limits of the mandate a district court may permissibly give its agent. There the district court, having found the defendant state department of corrections subjected inmates to cruel and unusual conditions, entered an injunction and appointed a special master, assisted by several monitors, 679 F.2d at 1159, to monitor implementation of the relief ordered. Id. at 1128. The special master was given unlimited access to [the defendants'] premises and records as well as the power to conduct confidential interviews with ... staff members and inmates. Id. at 1162. On appeal, the State argued the appointment was improper because there was no exceptional condition warranting it, as required by Rule 53. In rejecting that argument, the court of appeals approved the special master's mandate, namely, to report on [the department's] compliance with the district court's decree and to help implement the decree, thereby assum[ing] one of the plaintiffs' traditional roles. Id. at 1161. 53 The role of the special master in Ruiz was not nearly as broad as the role of the Monitor in this case. There the master was specifically instructed not to intervene in the administrative management of [the department] and ... not to direct the defendants or any of their subordinates to take or to refrain from taking any specific action to achieve compliance. Id. at 1162. Most important, the court of appeals clarified that the special master and the monitors were not to consider matters that go beyond superintending compliance with the district court's decree, thereby assuring the special master would not be an advocate for the plaintiffs or a roving federal district court. Id. 54 The last requirement highlights the problems with the role of the Monitor in this case, and with his appointment. The Monitor was not limited to superintending compliance with the district court's decree, but was instead ordered to monitor and review all of the ... defendants' trust reform activities, including the defendants' trust reform progress and any other matter Mr. Kieffer deems pertinent to trust reform. Nor could the Monitor have been limited to enforcing a decree, for there was no decree to enforce, let alone the sort of specific and detailed decree issued in Ruiz and typical of such cases. See Sandler & Schoenbrod, above, at 9 (referring to court decrees that are as thick as phone books). The case had been remanded to the Department for further proceedings not inconsistent with the opinion of the district court in order [t]o allow defendants the opportunity to promptly come into compliance. Cobell V, 91 F.Supp.2d at 58. Cf., e.g., Halderman, 612 F.2d at 111 (allowing special master to administer implementation of injunction and noting that [m]asters are peculiarly appropriate in the implementation of complex equitable decrees which require ongoing judicial supervision). In this case, the district court's appointment of the Monitor entailed a license to intrude into the internal affairs of the Department, which simply is not permissible under our adversarial system of justice and our constitutional system of separated powers. Accordingly, the district court should not have reappointed the Court Monitor on April 15, 2002 over the Department's objection.