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Text: Boddie was a challenge by welfare recipients to certain Connecticut procedures, including the payment of court fees and costs, that allegedly restricted their access to the courts for divorce. The plaintiffs, simply by reason of their indigency, were unable to bring their actions. The Court reversed a district court judgment that a State could limit access to its courts by fees "which effectively bar persons on relief from commencing actions therein." 286 F. Supp. 968, 972. Mr. Justice Harlan, writing for the Court, stressed state monopolization of the means for legally dissolving marriage and identified the would-be indigent divorce plaintiff with any other action's impoverished defendant forced into court by the institution of a lawsuit against him. He declared that "a meaningful opportunity to be heard" was firmly imbedded in our due process jurisprudence, 401 U. S., at 377, and that this was to be protected against denial by laws that operate to jeopardize it for particular individuals, id., at 379-380. The Court then concluded that Connecticut's refusal to admit these good-faith divorce plaintiffs to its courts equated with the denial of an opportunity to be heard and, in the absence of a sufficient countervailing justification for the State's action, a denial of due process, id., at 380-381.

But the Court emphasized that "we go no further than necessary to dispose of the case before us." Id., at 382.

"We do not decide that access for all individuals to the courts is a right that is, in all circumstances, guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment so that its exercise may not be placed beyond the reach of any individual, for, as we have already noted, in the case before us this right is the exclusive precondition to the adjustment of a fundamental human relationship. The requirement that these appellants resort to the judicial process is entirely a state-created matter. Thus we hold only that a State may not, consistent with the obligations imposed on it by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, pre-empt the right to dissolve this legal relationship without affording all citizens access to the means it has prescribed for doing so." Id., at 382-383.
MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS, concurring in the result, rested his conclusion on equal protection rather than due process. "I do not see the length of the road we must follow if we accept my Brother HARLAN'S invitation." Id., at 383, 385. MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN concurred in part, for he discerned no distinction between divorce and "any other right arising under federal or state law" and he, also, found a denial of equal protection. Id., at 386, 387. Mr. Justice Black dissented, id., at 389, feeling that the Connecticut court costs were barred by neither the Due Process Clause nor the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Just two months after Boddie was decided, the Court denied certiorari in Garland. 402 U. S. 966. MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN was of the opinion that certiorari should have been granted. Mr. Justice Black, in an opinion applicable to Garland and to seven other then-pending cases, 402 U. S. 954, dissented and would have heard argument in all eight cases "or reverse them outright on the basis of the decision in Boddie." Id., at 955. For him "the need . . . to file for a discharge in bankruptcy seem[ed] . . . more `fundamental' than a person's right to seek a divorce." Id., at 958. And MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS similarly dissented from the denial of certiorari in Garland and in four other cases because "obtaining a fresh start in life through bankruptcy proceedings . . . seemingly come[s] within the Equal Protection Clause." 402 U. S. 960, 961.

Thus, although a denial of certiorari normally carries no implication or inference, Chessman v. Teets, 354 U. S. 156, 164 n. 13 (1957); Brown v. Allen, 344 U. S. 443 (1953), the pointed dissents of Mr. Justice Black and MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS to the denial in Garland so soon after Boddie, and Mr. Justice Harlan's failure to join the dissenters, surely are not without some significance as to their and the Court's attitude about the application of the Boddie principle to bankruptcy fees.