Opinion ID: 482068
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Disregard of Controlling Supreme Court Authority

Text: 16 Some 13 years ago the Supreme Court summarily reversed our ruling that the Attorney General was estopped from denying these Filipino servicemen citizenship. In so doing the Court noted the twin public policies of the 1940 Act: 17 Here the petitioner has been charged by Congress with administering an Act which both made available benefits of naturalization to persons in respondent's class and established a cutoff date for the claiming of such benefits. Petitioner, in enforcing the cutoff date established by Congress, as well as in recognizing claims for the benefits conferred by the Act, is enforcing the public policy established by Congress. 18 Hibi, 414 U.S. at 8, 94 S.Ct. at 21 (emphasis added). Hibi concluded that the Attorney General's withdrawal of naturalization authority from the Philippines did not amount to affirmative misconduct; it therefore held that the government could not be equitably estopped from enforcing the congressional policy embodied in the Act's expiration date. 19 The panel's decision here uses somewhat different language but the result it reaches is precisely that rejected by the Supreme Court in Hibi: There is no meaningful difference between saying that the government is equitably estopped from raising the statutory cutoff date and disregarding the cutoff date as a matter of equity. The panel substitutes words for concepts. 20 While the panel seeks to distinguish Hibi, unsuccessfully in my view, one aspect of the Court's ruling is beyond cavil: the determination that the December 31, 1946, cutoff date is one of the public policies of the 1940 Act. [E]quity, wrote Justice Douglas, is the instrument for nice adjustment and reconciliation between the public interest and private needs as well as between competing private claims. Hecht Co. v. Bowles, 321 U.S. 321, 329-30, 64 S.Ct. 587, 592, 88 L.Ed. 754 (1944). One searches the panel's opinion in vain for weighing, consideration, acknowledgment or even recognition of the public policy established by Congress in the December 31, 1946, cutoff date. Hibi, 414 U.S. at 8, 94 S.Ct. at 21. If equitable principles are relevant here at all, but see pp. 1452-53, infra, the panel simply failed to apply them.