Opinion ID: 495033
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Standing Requirement: The Need for Reexamination

Text: 23 The case before us today is, from a factual viewpoint, a very different case from the case set forth in the complaint. The consent decree with respect to politically-motivated discharges, R.42; Consent Decree (May 5, 1972), has eliminated a significant portion of the contentions that were originally presented in the appellees' complaint and that were before this court during the earlier appeal in 1970, seventeen years ago. The combined impact of political hiring and firing practices--a significant part of the plaintiffs' original case--is therefore not before us on this appeal. This appeal raises only the constitutionality of politically-motivated hiring practices without any reference to other patronage-based employment practices--including the discharge scheme now forbidden by the consent decree, R.42; Consent Decree (May 5, 1972). More importantly, we are confronted with a significantly different legal landscape than the one that confronted the district court at the time the complaint was originally filed in 1969, at the time of the first appeal to this court in 1970, or at the time the district court made the ruling now before us in 1979. During these intervening years, the Supreme Court has engaged in a thorough examination of justiciability, the limitations imposed on federal courts by the case-and-controversy provision of article III. 24 These changes have made our consideration of the standing issue in this case most difficult. Indeed, one of the unhappy by-products of these changes has been that, with respect to the standing of voters and candidates to challenge hiring practices alone, we have not been able to regard the earlier holding of a panel of this court, dealing with the standing of voters and candidates to challenge the combination of hiring and firing practices, as having the precedential effect that we would normally accord such an earlier ruling of this court in the same litigation. The law of the case doctrine is not to be lightly disregarded. It is based on the salutary and sound public policy that litigation should come to an end. White v. Murtha, 377 F.2d 428, 431 (5th Cir.1967); see also Appleton Elec. Co. v. Graves Truck Line, Inc., 635 F.2d 603, 607-08 (7th Cir.1980), cert. denied, 451 U.S. 976, 101 S.Ct. 2058, 68 L.Ed.2d 357 (1981). See generally Roberts v. Cooper, 61 U.S. (20 How.) 467, 481, 15 L.Ed. 969 (1858). However, it must be remembered that this doctrine was understandably crafted with the course of ordinary litigation in mind. Arizona v. California, 460 U.S. 605, 618-19, 103 S.Ct. 1382, 1391, 75 L.Ed.2d 318 (1983). Moreover, the question of justiciability, grounded in the case-and-controversy requirement of article III, is essentially jurisdictional in nature. As this court noted in Christianson v. Colt Indus. Operating Corp., 798 F.2d 1051, 1056 (7th Cir.1986), courts are significantly less constrained by the law of the case doctrine with respect to jurisdictional questions. Here, where there have been substantial pronouncements in this area since 1970, we are not only free to reexamine the holding of the earlier panel but obliged to do so. 25