Opinion ID: 1095462
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Today's Best Fit For The Section 109 Term: Authorized

Text: I will be the first to concede that identification of and employment of the correct canons of construction, as in Part II(B) above, do not lead inexorably to reversal. They suggest an attitude, an approach, calling for skill and non-result oriented judgment in handling. They provide, one might say, a home court advantage for legislation judicially attacked. These Appellants have been denied that home court advantage, although they are of right entitled to it. Even so, all except Supervisor Knox should be accorded a road victory. Assuming arguendo that the interest test of Section 109 be met, [5] the argument for affirmance, even without benefit of the home court advantage accorded by correct canons of construction, founders on the word authorized. That is, before these public officials may be found in violation of the constitutional injunction, we must find them interested in contracts authorized by action of the board or other political body in which they serve. As the visiting team they are entitled to have the word authorized fairly construed. The word authorized, and the concept of authority, have familiar meanings. They import notions of legal power. One has authority regarding a matter not merely when as a practical matter he may act with effect but when some valid law provides that, if he so acts, no one may of right complain or interfere. Authority connotes the lawful delegation of power by one legal entity to another. Black's Law Dictionary 168 (4th ed. 1957). One authorized to act is one possessed of authority, that is, possessed of legal or rightful power. Id. at 169. How then do contracts become authorized within the best fit meaning of Section 109? The answer is found in identifying the legal entity which is legally empowered to obligate each contracting party to the terms of the contract. A twofold inquiry ensues. In what legal entity has our law invested the legal power to enter the contract? That is, whose action is a sine qua non to a successful breach or enforcement action? Second, has the legal entity having authority taken steps sufficient that the contract has in fact been legally authorized? Sen. Douglas L. Anderson and Rep. Hillman T. Frazier have contracts with the Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning. Those contracts have been authorized by the Trustees in the dual sense that (a) without the Trustees' action the contracts would not be enforceable by Anderson or Frazier and (b) no other legal person or entity has any legal power to render the contract enforceable in the absence of the Trustees' approval. The specific Section 109 question becomes, have Sen. Anderson and Rep. Frazier been interested in a contract authorized by any law passed or order made by any board of which he may ... have been a member... .? On the facts before us, the answer is inescapably No. The only legal entity that authorized, or that had authority to authorize, the contract was the Board of Trustees. There is no evidence before us that either Anderson or Frazier is or ever has been a member of the Board of Trustees. Conversely, neither the Senate, of which Anderson is a member, nor the House of Representatives, of which Frazier has been and is a member, has authorized either contract. That is, neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives has taken any action which has obligated anyone to perform the duties owing to Frazier by virtue of the contract. More fundamentally, we have no law which vests in the Senate or the House of Representatives (with or without the concurrence of the other house) any authority to render the contract duties owing to Anderson and Frazier enforceable by them. This is for the reason that the self-same constitution in Section 213-A thereof provides that the Board of Trustees shall have the power and authority to ... contract with all ... professors... . Nothing in the constitution directs that this authority be shared, nor has the legislature made any attempt to share it. At the risk of belaboring the point, there was and is only one legal entity which had and has the authority to make legally enforceable contracts with Sen. Anderson and Rep. Frazier: the Board of Trustees. That same Board had exclusive lawful authority to decline to contract with Anderson and Frazier, or either of them, and has such exclusive authority to refuse to contract anew. The cynics note that as legislators Anderson and Frazier have clout they may exercise to motivate the Board of Trustees in the performance of their contracting duties. No doubt in some ephemeral sense this is true, although we know of no way Anderson may cause the Board or any state university to be affected without concurrence of at least 26 other senators, each of whom is answerable to a constituency over which Anderson has no effective control and none of whom has a reputation for being bashful. And Frazier would need concurrence of 61 other representatives. Moreover, the constitution mandates in Section 213-A that the Trustees shall perform their duties uninfluenced by any political considerations. We normally presume that public officials perform their lawful duties, at least in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Harris v. Harrison County Board of Supervisors, 366 So.2d 651, 655-56 (Miss. 1979); Raper v. State, 317 So.2d 709, 712-13 (Miss. 1975). Such a presumption here is not nearly so fanciful as many in which we have indulged in other contexts. See McElroy, Mississippi Evidence § 13 (1955). Moreover, there is no evidence in the record before us that the Board or any of its Trustees has violated this duty. The majority's retort is that, even though the legislature has no legal power to authorize or enter a contract with Anderson or Frazier to teach at Jackson State, it funds contracts the Board authorizes. Funding is said to be tantamount to authorization. There are many problems with this argument, not the least of which is that neither Mr. Webster nor Mr. Black has ever defined authorized to include funded, nor vice versa. Beyond this, the legislature makes an annual appropriation to the Board of Trustees. The legislature has no lawful authority to require that the Board spend that money in any particular way. More specifically, the legislature has no authority to require that the Board direct Jackson State to employ Anderson or Frazier and to pay either of them any particular salary. The suggestion that authorized encompasses funded purely and simply violates the rule of best fit. Funding is not a meaning that fits the word authorized. The best that may fairly be said is that passage of an appropriations bill indirectly authorizes a public employee's contract, yet the very wording of Section 109 enjoins this construction. The draftsmen of Section 109 were conversant with words and concepts like direct and indirect for they included within the section's scope direct and indirect interests. No ... legislat[or] shall be interested, directly or indirectly.... If funding had been thought within authorized, it would seem that like language would have been employed. The draftsmen would have inserted, following the word authorized the phrase directly or indirectly. Those words are not there. Herein lies one of many ironies of the majority opinion. The language of Section 109 mandates an expansive reading of interest; we read interest narrowly. On the other hand, the language contains nothing suggesting an expansive reading of authorized, and canons of construction noted above in the context of today's case suggest a narrow reading. Again the majority does the opposite. The best reading we may give the complete Section 109 is that interests direct and indirect are proscribed while only direct authorization is contemplated. Legislative appropriations to the college board or to school districts whose boards in turn authorize contracts with teachers are simply not within a fair reading of Section 109 as it is (as distinguished from as some, for reasons that elude me, wish it were). The majority relies on an Oklahoma case for the proposition that a legislative appropriation bill authorizes a school teacher's contract. State v. Board of Education of Dependent School District No. D-38, 389 P.2d 356, 359 (Okla. 1964). With no disrespect for the Oklahoma court, I would point to New Mexico which provides the opposite: that the contract of employment [of the legislator/school supervisor] was not authorized by the appropriation bill. State ex rel. Baca v. Otero, 33 N.M. 310, 267 P. 68, 69 (1928). All non-Mississippi precedents, [6] however, fade in the context of appropriate analysis of the language of our Section 109. There is another point. Assuming arguendo, that authorize includes funding, what is it that the legislature votes to authorize when it passes appropriations bills for our public educational institutions? Not these contracts. To come within Section 109, those bills must authorize the contracts of Sen. Anderson, et al. Those contracts, of course, are in no way before the legislature when it considers the annual appropriations requests for public education. Those contracts at that time aren't even in existence. As explained above, there is nothing in the making of those appropriations that suggests these contracts will ever have legal existence. Even if legislative funding authorizes something, that something does not include the contracts with these legislator-educators, unless of course one reads Section 109 far more expansively than the law allows. Even the visiting team is entitled to have the rules applied according to their plain meaning, especially when of right it was entitled to the home court advantage.