Opinion ID: 1235436
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 27

Heading: Response to concurring and dissenting opinions

Text: The three separate opinions filed by our colleagues reflect the diversity of views possible in a case of this magnitude and difficulty. In her concurring and dissenting opinion, Justice Kennard expresses agreement with our interpretation of the Privacy Initiative and the legal standard we articulate, but would remand this case for further proceedings rather than direct judgment for the NCAA. As a result, five justices of this court concur in the basic test defining the scope of our state constitutional right to privacy. In contrast, both Justices George and Mosk would place on the NCAA the burden of showing a compelling interest to justify its drug testing program. But their radically different applications of the same proferred compelling interest test illustrate its inherently elusive character. Justice George finds the threshold imposed sufficiently low to allow the NCAA's drug testing program to pass through unimpeded, even as a matter of law. In essence, he finds the compelling interest test to require an interest of some importance, but one that may be something less than vital or absolutely essential to an enterprise. Justice Mosk, on the other hand, believes the compelling interest step is such a high one that the NCAA is tripped up at the outset. We prefer to avoid the continuing uncertainty and confusion inherent in the rigid application of a compelling interest test to a multi-faceted right to privacy. The NCAA lost this case in the lower courts because it could not, in the views of two superior court judges and three Court of Appeal justices, show a sufficiently compelling reason for its drug testing program. At least one other appellate court in our state has erroneously concluded in an employment drug testing case that a compelling interest test places a heavier burden on [the defendant] than would a Fourth Amendment privacy analysis, in which the permissibility of a particular practice is judged by balancing its intrusion on the individual's Fourth Amendment interests against its promotion of legitimate government interests. ( Luck v. Southern Pacific Transportation Co., supra, 218 Cal. App.3d 1, 20.) We will not perpetuate this kind of error by continuing to say compelling when we mean merely legitimate or important. There is enough confusion in the law. We should say what we mean and mean what we say. Even at the risk of losing some degree of flexibility in decisionmaking, a constitutional standard that carefully weighs the pertinent interests at stake in an ordered fashion is preferable to one dominated by the vague and ambiguous adjective compelling. Because, unlike Justices George and Mosk, we discern confusion rather than clarity in the language and history of the Privacy Initiative on this issue, we have restated the standard in a manner consistent with the voters' intent and amenable to application in constitutional adjudication. Our lower courts, as well as the individuals and institutions in our society, are entitled to some comprehensible guidance from this Court, even in areas as abstract as the right to be let alone. Justice Mosk's dissent assails our views on both the law and the facts. The reasons for our interpretations of the Privacy Initiative and the case law are fully discussed elsewhere in this opinion. Our differences regarding the record in this case are also explored in the preceding sections. The dissent studiously ignores student athletes' markedly diminished expectations of privacy and the NCAA's self-evident interests in protecting athletes and athletic competition from the nefarious influence of chemical substances. Despite the broad, elaborate, and plaintiff-prepared findings of the trial court, these were not matters of legitimate factual dispute in this case  they arise from uncontradicted evidence presented at trial. Drugs have no place in intercollegiate athletics, where human physical performance is at stake and small fractions of time or distance can spell the difference between victory and defeat. As a sponsor of athletic competition, the NCAA was well within its legal rights in adopting a drug testing program designed to eliminate the actual or potential influence of drugs in competitive sports. The dissent's view that the voters of the State of California somehow used the word privacy to prevent a private voluntary organization from regulating college sports in the interest of fair competition finds no support in logic, reason, or social reality, let alone in the language or history of the Privacy Initiative.