Opinion ID: 1661329
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: This Court's Composition

Text: The Louisiana constitution decrees that The judicial power is vested in a supreme court ... and other courts authorized by this Article,  La.Const. art. 5 § 1; The supreme court shall be composed of a chief justice and six associate justices, four of whom must concur to render judgment, art. 5, § 3; and The state shall be divided into at least six supreme court districts, and at least one judge shall be elected from each, art. 5 § 4 (emphasis the writer's). The present court is not so composed. It consists of four of the six elected associate justices and three Court of Appeal judges whom the seven elected justices have ordered to sit as justices pro tempore (or justices ad hoc). The seven elected Justices, in State v. Bell, La.1981, 395 So.2d 805, have ruled that because without qualification La.Const. art. 5, § 5(A) says that the Supreme Court may assign a sitting or retired judge to any court, they have a plenary power to do so, a power that is explicit and unfettered. By these words, Bell expressly asserts that this power knows no bounds. Bell is wrong. There are limits on all sides. First, there are the external impingements of reality: the Louisiana Supreme Court cannot pretend to have power to assign a Mississippi Justice of the Peace, or a local United States District Judge, to the Texas Supreme Court, or to the United States Supreme Court, or to the Cour de Cassation in Paris, or even to the Louisiana Supreme Court. Bell must be conceded to be wrong, at least to that extent, in its claim to explicit and unfettered, plenary power. Second, there are further inferential limits upon the assignment of a judge to any court within the phrase itself. The meaning is that the judge must be assigned as a judge of the court to which assigned, and that the court must be an existing, legally established Louisiana court, authorized by this Article [5] of the Louisiana Constitution. Thus the justices of the Louisiana Supreme Court do not have the power to assign a judge to that Court to clerk their cases, cook their collards, cut their crabgrass, or clean their commodes. Nor do they have power to assign judges to a court of their creation, such as a court of criminal appeals. Bell is wrong in claiming so unfettered an enfeoffment of inferior judges to the Louisiana Supreme Court. Third, and more important, the Louisiana Constitution contains 14 Articles, each of which contains several sections, some of which in turn contain subdivisions. Article 5's section 5's subdivision (A)'s assignment clause is one of many, many provisions of that Constitution. Although the language of any clause of the constitution is presumably selected with the utmost discrimination, Western Union T. Co. v. Railroad Comm., 1908, 120 La. 758, 45 So. 598, 599, the provisions of any one subdivision must be read in connection with all others, State v. City of Baton Rouge, 1949, 215 La. 315, 40 So.2d 477, and must be read in harmony with the whole instrument, Meyers v. Flournoy, 1946, 209 La. 812, 25 So.2d 601. The entire constitution is as binding on the Louisiana Supreme Court as on the executive and legislative departments of government, and on the people themselves, Graham v. Jones, 1941, 198 La. 507, 3 So.2d 761. The courts are obliged to follow the same rules of reasonable interpretation with the constitution as with other laws, State v. Baton Rouge, supra; Nicholson v. Thompson, La. 1843, 5 Rob. 367; and a construction with unseemly and absurd consequences must be avoided, Blessing v. Levy, 1949, 214 La. 856, 39 So.2d 84, 87; State v. Joseph, 1918, 143 La. 428, 78 So. 663. La.Const. art. 5 §§ 1, 3, and 4 are the Louisiana constitutional bedrock for the composition of the Louisiana Supreme Court. None of those is even mentioned in the Bell case, yet each appears to conflict with Bell's theory that the Supreme Court's assignment power is unfettered and plenary. Section 1 provides for a supreme court, that is, one Supreme Court, preventing the elected Justices from erecting a second seven-person Supreme Court by assignment of seven other judges, and also from creating two additional Supreme Courts each month by supplanting three elected members with three different assigned judges twice every month for criminal hearings only; the Constitution provides a supreme court, and the judicial power is only vested in ... courts authorized by this Article, art. 5 § 1. Section 3 provides that The supreme court shall be composed of a chief justice and six associate justices, further suggesting that the explicit and unfettered assignment power does not authorize constituting the Supreme Court of nine or 13 justices by assigning other judges to be supernumerary justices. Nor, in my view, does the assignment power authorize displacing the Chief and two Associate Justices as has been done on this very court. It is an absurd construction that would allow a liberal majority of four Justices to assign the conservative minority of three Justices to the far marshes as Justices of the Peace, while assigning to the Supreme Court three judges known for their liberal views, so as to make Louisiana Supreme Court working conditions more agreeable and decisions more often unanimous. Moreover, § 3 requires in respect to the chief justice and six associate justices that four of [them] must concur to render judgment, meaning, at least while there are seven elected Justices available, that four elected Justices must concur for the Supreme Court to adjudicate a case. Section 4 requires that the state be divided into at least six supreme court districts, and at least one judge shall be elected from each. It hardly should have to be said that the purpose of electing those judges is to have those judges serve as the Justices of the Court; and the purpose of electing them from geographical districts is to have the occasionally divergent views of different areas of the state represented (see VI Records of the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1973, 714-721, 30th Day's ProceedingsAugust 15, 1973). Section 4 thus imposes as a limit upon the assignment power that the elected Justices cannot assign other judges to do the work they have been elected to do; cannot substitute appointed judges for elected judges the Constitution so expressly requires. Additionally, if the election districts and the number of judges assigned to each are to be changed, it can only be by law enacted by two-thirds of the elected members of each house of the legislature, § 4 declares. La.Const. art. 5 § 23(A) provides The retirement benefits and judicial service rights of a judge in office or retired on the effective date of this constitution shall not be diminished, and that too must be deemed a limit on the power to assign a sitting or retired judge to any court. Is that power so unfettered that it can force a retired judge out of retirement, perhaps oblige him or her to return to Louisiana from a distant retirement haven? (And does not true disability, as by stroke or senility, also limit that unlimited power?) La.Const. art. 5 § 5(D) (prior to its amendment effective July 1, 1982) provides that a case shall be appealable to the supreme courtmeaning the Supreme Court that art. 5, §§ 1, 3, and 4 describe and constituteif ... (2) the defendant has been convicted of a felony or a fine exceeding five hundred dollars or imprisonment exceeding six months actually has been imposed. No person can be subjected to prosecution or be deprived of his liberty by Louisiana except in accord with the Louisiana Constitution and laws, State v. Kiffe, 1947, 210 La. 863, 28 So.2d 459; and when the Constitution requires different tribunals for different classes of offenses, that requirement constitutes a due process retirement that cannot be changed by the Legislature, State v. Jacques, 1931, 171 La. 994, 132 So. 657. Nor, by identical reasoning, can the Louisiana Supreme Court change that due process requirement by assigning other judges to hear the appeals the Constitution assigns to itself. La.Const. art. 1 § 2 demands that No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property, except by due process of law including, art. 1 § 19, the right of judicial review based upon a complete record of all evidence upon which the judgment is based and, of course the appeal to the Supreme Court provided by art. 5 § 5(D); see Jacques, supra . Furthermore, art. 1 § 22 requires that All courts shall be open, and every person shall have adequate remedy by due process of law ... for injury to him in his person, property, reputation or other rights. These due process and open courts requirements further impose as a limit on the assignment power that it cannot be used to close the Supreme Court to an accused who has a Louisiana due process right to appeal to the Supreme Court for redress against a trial court conviction or sentence. In sum, Bell's declarations that the Supreme Court's assignment power is unfettered and plenary, and that otherwise-unmentioned [3] arguments to the contrary are wholly without substance and merit, are simply not a reasonable response to a dead-serious problem of what appears to be a plainly unconstitutional exercise of the assignment power. To dismiss a question is not to answer it. As Justice Frankfurter observed, concurring in Joint Anti-Fascist R. Comm. v. McGrath, 1951, 341 U.S. 123, 171, 71 S.Ct. 624, 648, 95 L.Ed. 817, The validity and moral authority of a conclusion largely depend on the mode by which it was reached. Law is something more than mere will exerted as an act of power, Hurtado v. California, 1884, 110 U.S. 516, 535, 4 S.Ct. 111, 121, 28 L.Ed. 232. What the authorized extent of the undoubtable power to assign a sitting or retired judge to any court may be is unnecessary here to decide. The Constitutional Convention transcript appended hereto does, however, offer several examples of its intended use. This writer has been assigned to the Supreme Court expressly under the assignment power of art. 5 § 5(A), and expressly to sit in place of Justice Blanche (who had to recuse himself because he had participated in the case in the Court of Appeal), in Cosey v. Cosey, La.1978, 376 So.2d 486. Surely, the assignment power is explicit: but it is not unfettered and plenary and it does not allow the composition of this court in contradiction to art. 5 §§ 1, 3 and 4 of the Louisiana Constitution. The elected Justices virtually so concede by their deeds in taking the decision of Bell away from the assigned Justices, and in taking every final decision away from the assigned Justices by removing them from the Court on applications for rehearing. They know that there is a supreme court, La.Const. art. 5 § 1, with seven Justices elected from geographical districts, §§ 3 and 4. They know that they are the real Supreme Court, and that this Court is not.