Opinion ID: 1356666
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Petitioner's constitutional claim.

Text: Petitioner begins his brief in the Court of Appeals with a constitutional attack on the statutory phrase unprofessional conduct. The attack is as unspecific as its target. We have had previous occasion to point out that constitutional claims should identify the provisions of the constitution, state and federal, that the governmental action is said to contravene and should show the relevance of these provisions to the claim. See, e.g., Rogers v. Department of Revenue, 284 Or. 409, 412 n. 2, 587 P.2d 91 (1978). Petitioner's brief cites no clause of either constitution for his assertion that unprofessional conduct is so vague as to be constitutionally impermissible. Possibly the seductive alliteration void for vagueness is thought to have achieved constitutional status on its own, judging by how often it is invoked. Actually, vagueness in a statute, ordinance, regulation, decree, order, or other legal rule is a fault for reasons which differ with the function of the rule at issue, and which must search for footing in still unsettled constitutional premises. But since the constitutional claim in this case, though unspecific, is not frivolous and addresses a significant problem, and since our duty is to credit the lawmaker with intending to act constitutionally, [2] we briefly examine its possible merits. An initial distinction is whether unprofessional conduct is attacked as inadequate to guide the Board of Dental Examiners or as inadequate to inform dentists of the conduct expected under their license. Often very broad terms, even broader than unprofessional conduct, are employed in laws that assign an agency responsibility for managing a program or pursuing a policy whose goals the law indicates only in the most general sense. As recently stated in Anderson v. Peden, 284 Or. 313, 587 P.2d 59 (1978), the constitutional issue in such broad delegations of authority is only whether it remains possible for the agency and for reviewing courts to determine when subsequent agency rules or actions have honored and when they have departed from the general policy indicated by the politically accountable lawmaker. [3] So much necessarily follows from the assignment of the legislative power to the Legislative Assembly (when not exercised directly by the people or by local home rule) and its denial to the other departments. Or.Const. art. IV, § 1; art. III, § 1. But almost always scrutiny of the grant of authority will turn this necessary determination into a question of interpreting the agency's assignment rather than of invalidating the delegation for vagueness. Beyond doubt unprofessional conduct is constitutionally adequate as a directive giving the board authority to prescribe standards under which its licensees will be subject to professional discipline. It is another question whether unprofessional conduct is adequate by itself as a standard for deciding individual cases. It involves additional considerations which are reflected in different constitutional premises. In criminal cases, one concern about overly general or vague penal laws is that they not only allow a court or a jury to define a crime but to do so after the fact, contrary to article I, section 21 of the constitution. See State v. Blair, 287 Or. 519, 601 P.2d 766 (1979), quoting from State v. Hodges, 254 Or. 21, 457 P.2d 491 (1969). [4] The second concern is that such laws do not give fair notice of what they proscribe in time to let a person conform to the law, so that the imposition of punishment deprives him of liberty or property without due process of law under the fourteenth amendment. See State v. Hodges, supra ; Lenzetta v. New Jersey, 306 U.S. 451, 59 S.Ct. 618, 83 L.Ed. 888 (1939). As a premise for a requirement of due process, the right to notice of the law has its own problems. [5] But in any event this principle, like that against ex post facto laws, is generally confined to penal sanctions. No one familiar with the common law expects due process to preserve one either from indefinite standards or from their delegation to juries or judges in civil cases, though one may stand to lose far more than under many criminal laws. See Anderson v. Peden, supra, 284 Or. at 324, 587 P.2d 59. We may assume that petitioner could not be prosecuted for a statutory crime described only as unprofessional conduct. But the same premises do not obviously apply to a revocation of his professional license under that standard. If loss of the right to practice one's profession were employed as a form of punishment for delinquencies apart from safeguarding proper performance in the professional role, the implications would go beyond the adequacy of the standard to issues of criminal procedure generally, see Brown v. Multnomah County Dist. Ct., 280 Or. 95, 100, 105, 570 P.2d 52 (1977) and cf. Dickinson v. Davis, 277 Or. 665, 670-671, 561 P.2d 1019 (1977), if indeed its use for punishment would be constitutional at all. Cf. Ex parte Garland, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 333, 18 L.Ed. 366 (1867) (invalidating the disqualification of former Confederate supporters from law practice in federal courts). No doubt the disqualified person's loss is equally grave whether it is inflicted as punishment for wrongdoing or as enforcement of professional discipline. But we have no reason to attribute the former rather than the latter objective to laws that allow disqualification for unprofessional conduct. Petitioner cannot rest a constitutional attack on ORS 679.140 on the decisions that hold penal laws unenforceable for vagueness. In common parlance a claimed denial of due process of law may intend simply a claim of illegality, of failure to follow what the claimant asserts to be the law. But when a state law is attacked for failure to provide due process, we are in the realm of the fourteenth amendment, where guidance must be found in the decisions of the United States Supreme Court. [6] Such an attack depends not on our own views but, rather, on the premise that if a state law explicitly directed a board to apply unprofessional conduct case by case in disciplinary proceedings, the Supreme Court would reverse the revocation of an occupational license without prior specification of standards as a deprivation of liberty or property without due process of law. There is no lack of suggestion that a prior specification of grounds should be a prerequisite of due process in administrative as well as penal deprivations. See, e.g., Davis, Administrative Law of the Seventies 28, 224 (1976); Note, Due Process Limitations on Occupational Licensing, 59 Va.L. Rev. 1097, 1104-1106 (1973). [7] At least one modern court has held that the grounds to revoke a pharmacist's license for grossly unprofessional conduct must be limited to those further spelled out in the statute or in rules, because revocation of licenses and permits for conduct not specifically defined or prohibited by the statute, would render the statute unconstitutional on grounds of vagueness in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pennsylvania State Board of Pharmacy v. Cohen, 448 Pa. 189, 292 A.2d 277, 282 (1972). To support this conclusion the court took the step of tacking together the two propositions that an individual's exclusion from an occupation requires due process and that penal statutes must give adequate notice of the forbidden or required conduct: Given the critical consequences including `the loss of professional standing, professional reputation, and of livelihood. .', Spevack v. Klein, 385 U.S. 511, 516, 87 S.Ct. 625, 628 [, 17 L.Ed.2d 574] (1967), attending the suspension or revocation of a pharmacist's license and permit, there can be no doubt that the imposition of sanctions under section 390-5 must satisfy the requirements of notice and clear description of what is prohibited conduct imposed on all penal statutes by the Fourteenth Amendment. . . 292 A.2d at 282. Perhaps federal due process law will move toward the step anticipated by the Pennsylvania court. [8] But, contrary to the sentence last quoted, there has been no clear signal from the United States Supreme Court that the standards for occupational licensing decisions must meet those for penal laws. The Court's later holdings sustaining the adequacy of phrases such as conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman for military punishment, Parker v. Levy, 417 U.S. 733, 94 S.Ct. 2547, 41 L.Ed.2d 439 (1974) and a string of epithets [9] for disciplinary discharge of civil service employees, Arnett v. Kennedy, 416 U.S. 134, 94 S.Ct. 1633, 40 L.Ed.2d 15 (1974), can be distinguished as dealing with special relationships. Nonetheless, the gravity of the losses there permitted to be inflicted under vague standards leaves the crucial step assumed by the Pennsylvania court in doubt. Again, the factors from which Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319, 96 S.Ct. 893, 47 L.Ed.2d 18 (1976), directs us to derive the requirements of due process  the private interest affected, the chances of error and of its reduction by better procedures, and the countervailing governmental interests  clearly affirm a licensee's right to the kind of adjudicatory procedures of notice, hearing, and findings based on evidence that, in this state, are provided him under the administrative procedure act; [10] but nothing indicates whether this due process calculus extends also to restricting adverse action to the enforcement of previously specified norms. For the moment, at least, support for finding such a requirement in federal due process appears primarily in Soglin v. Kauffman, 418 F.2d 163 (7th Cir.1969), which applied the requirement to standards for expelling university students for misconduct, and in decisions involving criteria for the bestowing of benefits. [11] In sum, the most that can be said about due process as a possible premise for petitioner's constitutional attack on the phrase unprofessional conduct is that the state of the federal law is inconclusive and the attack perhaps only premature. Nor is the phrase vulnerable under the state constitution as transferring legislative power to the board or as empowering the board to make laws ex post facto, since the object of the law is not to punish misconduct as such but to confine the practice of the profession to those who maintain professional standards of conduct. However, to conclude that the law is not unconstitutional does not decide what it means. We turn to that question.