Opinion ID: 1318757
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the agency order

Text: At the outset, we must work our way through a number of problems that the parties and the Court of Appeals passed over in silence. The school district and the Superintendent of Public Instruction (hereafter Superintendent in distinction from the district's superintendent) seek a decision on the constitutionality of ORS 342.650 and 342.655, and this may also be the chief remaining objective of the teacher, who has moved to New Mexico and whose Oregon teaching certificate has been reinstated conditional upon compliance with the law. Nonetheless, this case like others is, and if possible should remain, a case of ordinary administrative and statutory law before becoming a constitutional case. [2] The case came before the Court of Appeals on judicial review of an order in a contested administrative proceeding to revoke a license, and it cannot be converted into a declaratory proceeding on the constitutionality of a statute to accommodate the parties. The problems passed over in silence are, first, why the school district is a party to this proceeding; second, what was before the Superintendent for decision in a contested case; and third, whether the case is moot. A reading of the statutes makes evident how these problems are interrelated. Standing in the revocation procedure. ORS 342.650 forbids a teacher to wear any religious dress while engaged in the performance of his duties as a teacher. ORS 342.655 directs the district school board to suspend the employment of any teacher who violates this proscription and to report its action to the Superintendent, who shall revoke the teacher's teaching certificate. Obviously disputes may arise over exactly how a teacher was dressed, whether what she wore was religious dress, what the teacher's duties as a teacher were, and whether she wore the religious dress while engaged in the performance of those duties. The agency that makes those determinations is the district school board. ORS 342.655 does not direct the Superintendent to reexamine the school board's findings and action and its underlying findings and conclusions before revoking the teacher's certificate. We do not foreclose an argument that could be made to the contrary, possibly under the Administrative Procedure Act, ORS 183.310(2)(a)(C), but none was made here. The present version of ORS 342.650 and 342.655 was enacted in 1965 in a major revision of public education laws that included extensive provisions governing the certification, employment, and discharge of teachers. Or.Laws 1965, ch 100. These provisions were further amended during the same session by the Teacher Tenure Law, Or.Laws 1965, ch. 608. The Teacher Tenure Law entitled a permanent teacher to have a district superintendent's recommendation of dismissal reviewed by a panel of a Professional Review Committee and to a hearing by the school board before the board acted on the recommendation. In 1971, the law again was amended to provide review of a teacher's dismissal by a panel of the Fair Dismissal Appeals Board. Or.Laws 1971, ch. 570. These statutes are now found in ORS 342.805 to 342.930. [3] None of the parties nor the Court of Appeals addressed the question what substantive or procedural effects various provisions of the Teacher Tenure Law might have on a teacher's suspension and a resulting revocation of the teacher's certificate under ORS 342.650 and 342.655. The teacher obviously has standing to challenge the state Superintendent's revocation of her teaching certificate, and a demand for a hearing before that official is a logical first step, despite doubts whether the law leaves anything for him to decide. But the school district's stake in the revocation of the teacher's certificate is far from obvious. The district need not request revocation and is not otherwise a necessary party to the revocation proceeding. Again, possible arguments for allowing the district to intervene in the revocation proceeding can be imagined, but none were made here. [4] The record contains no motion to intervene or order allowing intervention. The district simply appeared before the Superintendent's hearing officer without stating any reasons for its appearance and was allowed to participate without objection. The Superintendent's responsibility. What the parties wanted the Superintendent to decide was the constitutional validity of the law forbidding a teacher to wear religious dress while on duty. The Superintendent, adopting the hearing officer's memorandum of law, concluded that he had no power to decide the constitutional question. The memorandum stated: Judicial decisions are not completely in accord, but the clear consensus seems to be that in a proceeding such as this the administrative agency has no authority to declare an act of the legislature to be contrary to the federal and state constitutions. That decision is to be made by a court. The Attorney General takes a contrary position. The memorandum quoted Professor K.C. Davis's distinction between applying a statute constitutionally, which is the agency's duty, and determining the constitutional validity of a statute, which Davis considers to be beyond an agency's power. [5] Enough judicial opinions have said that agencies cannot pass on the constitutionality of the laws entrusted to them to support the cautious conclusion of the hearing officer's memorandum, at least as to federal agencies; but more recently the proposition has been questioned. [6] It deserves examination. Agency power to consider constitutional challenges to a statute generally has been discussed in opinions on exhaustion of administrative remedies. The issue has been, not whether an agency erred in considering such a challenge, but whether a litigant could take the challenge to court without first asking the agency to pass upon it. Both the Davis treatise and Jaffe, Judicial Control of Administrative Action 438 (1965), place the question under the exhaustion heading. This is not such a case. Opinions denying agency power in constitutional cases only as an explanation for dispensing with the normal exhaustion requirement are weak authority for holding that an agency should not consider a constitutional claim when a party chooses to exhaust that process, or that the agency errs if it doesdecide the issue. If an agency decides a constitutional issue, though needlessly, the only result is that it will be affirmed on judicial review if the decision was right and reversed if the decision was wrong. It would be pointless to reverse an agency for correctly deciding a legal question on the ground that the agency should have waited for the reviewing court to decide the question. Long familiarity with the institution of judicial review sometimes leads to the misconception that constitutional law is exclusively a matter for the courts. To the contrary, when a court sets aside government action on constitutional grounds, it necessarily holds that legislators or officials attentive to a proper understanding of the constitution would or should have acted differently. [7] Doubt of an agency's obligation to decide constitutional challenges to its governing statute is itself a question of interpreting the agency's statutory duties. The agency's duty to decide such challenges would not be doubted if the legislature provided for it expressly rather than doing so implicitly under the general term law in the Administrative Procedure Act provisions that require a final order in a contested case to include the agency's conclusions of law, ORS 183.470(2), and subject the order to reversal if it violates a constitutional provision, ORS 183.482(8)(b)(C), see also ORS 183.484(4)(b)(C). An agency ordinarily can interpret a statute so as to exclude unconstitutional applications before it is forced to question the statute's validity. An agency also should consider whether anyone can obtain higher executive or judicial review if the agency erroneously concludes that the statute contravenes the constitution. In the present case, as we next discuss, there is no obvious party that could obtain review if the Superintendent held ORS 342.650 or 342.655 unconstitutional. The parties' standing in the Court of Appeals. As already noted, the school district's legal interest in the Superintendent's revocation of Cooper's teaching certificate under ORS 342.655 is doubtful. The district maintains, and in the absence of any objection the Court of Appeals could accept, that the district's unopposed appearance before the hearing officer effectively made it an intervening party. Cf. Marbet v. Portland Gen. Elect., 277 Or. 447, 561, P.2d 154 (1977). But the district's role became even more dubious after the Superintendent ordered revocation of the certificate, when the district filed a petition to review that order in the Court of Appeals, naming Cooper as the respondent and seeking to have the order affirmed. At this point, the Court of Appeals should have dismissed the district's petition for judicial review. The court quoted ORS 183.480(1), which allows any party to an agency proceeding to seek judicial review of a final order in a contested case, and it wrote that the statute does not require that the petitioning party attack the validity of the order. 76 Or.App. at 148 n. 2, 708 P.2d 1161. That is an improbable reading of the judicial review provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act. It assumes that the legislature entitled a party that won everything it asked from the agency to seek judicial review solely in order to win once more in the Court of Appeals. The court's theory would entitle an agency, as a party to its own proceedings, to seek a judicial imprimatur for its acts when no one has challenged their legality and when the agency neither needs nor seeks a court's aid to enforce them. Such an innovation in judicial review would require a clear legislative directive, if indeed it would remain within the judicial power at all. We find no such clear directive. Two of the judicial review sections point toward the contrary, conventional assumption. ORS 183.480(1) has provided judicial review separately for any person adversely affected or aggrieved and for any party to an agency proceeding (emphasis added) since the section was amended in 1971 to extend judicial review to adversely affected or aggrieved persons who were not parties to any proceeding. See Marbet v. Portland Gen. Elect., supra, 277 Or. at 457, 561 P.2d 154; cf. Jefferson Landfill Comm. v. Marion Co., 297 Or. 280, 686 P.2d 310 (1984). The subsection continues by expressly dispensing with the prerequisite of a petition for reconsideration by the agency. This provision reflects the normal assumption that a petitioner for judicial review finds some fault with the agency's order. ORS 183.482, prescribing judicial review of orders in contested cases, does not expressly require the petition for review to state the grounds why the order should be reversed or remanded, but ORS 183.484(3) makes this clear with respect to agency orders outside contested cases. [8] That a party wishes an agency to explain its order by different or further reasons, as the school district requested in this case, is not a demand for modification of the order. The school district requested the Court of Appeals to affirm the Superintendent's order revoking Cooper's teaching certificate. The district's only stated disappointment with the Superintendent's order is that his reasons for it did not expressly declare ORS 342.650 and 342.655 to be constitutional, an issue that he held to be beyond his authority. He did, however, apply the law and revoke the certificate, and the school district's petition for judicial review asked the court to affirm that order without modification. For the reasons we have stated, the Court of Appeals should have dismissed that petition. Fifteen days after the school district's petition, Cooper also petitioned for judicial review of the Superintendent's revocation of her teaching certificate. If Cooper's petition properly brought the order before the Court of Appeals, could the school district appear before the Court of Appeals to defend the order? Again, the record contains no motion or order to allow intervention, and no discussion whether, under ORS 183.482(2), a person may become a party for the first time on judicial review to defend rather than attack an administrative order. In the absence of an objection, however, we see no jurisdictional obstacle that the Court of Appeals had to raise on its own initiative. The district could remain in the case as a respondent to Cooper's attack on the Superintendent's order. Finally, we must consider whether the case became moot on its way to this court. Cooper's petition for judicial review asserted that ORS 342.650, and therefore the revocation of her teaching certificate under ORS 342.655, contravene the guarantees of religious freedom under the state and federal constitutions as well as the provisions of Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 USC § 2000e to 2000e-16 (1981 & Supp 1986). The Court of Appeals noted that subsequently the Superintendent reinstated Cooper's teaching certificate on condition that she not wear religious dress while on duty, and it held that the condition saved Cooper's appeal from being moot. [9] Eventually the court held that revocation of a teaching certificate was an excessive sanction under the First Amendment and reversed the order under review. The Superintendent for the first time became a losing party and as such entitled to seek review in this court of the invalidation of his order and ORS 342.655. So did the school district, once it was accepted as an intervenor in support of the Superintendent's order. The foregoing procedural problems should have been dealt with below, which might have obviated any need for further review. Despite the dubious status of the parties and proceedings below, however, the holding of the Court of Appeals left the case in a posture in which the Superintendent now is entitled a decision from this court.