Opinion ID: 171635
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Standard for Adjudicating the Coercive-Remedial Distinction

Text: While I agree with the majority that the distinction must be addressed, I disagree with the articulated standard. The Supreme Court's failure to explain what types of proceedings are coercive and what types are remedial produced a circuit split on the issue. On the one hand, the First Circuit looks to who initiated the administrative process. If it was the federal plaintiff, then the proceedings are remedial; if the state, coercive. Kercado-Melendez, 829 F.2d at 260 (explaining Patsy and Dayton along the lines of who initiates the administrative proceedings). The majority finds this approach attractive. The Third, Fourth, and Seventh Circuits, on the other hand, all focus on the underlying nature and substance of the administrative proceedings, asking whether the proceedings can be characterized as state enforcement proceedings. If they can, they are coercive, which is to say judicial in nature; if not, remedial. Majors, 149 F.3d at 712 (For purposes of Younger abstention, administrative proceedings are `judicial in nature' when they are coercivei.e., state enforcement proceedings....); see also Laurel, 519 F.3d at 166 (tying together the terms coercive and judicial in nature); O'Neill, 32 F.3d at 791 n. 13 (explaining the coercive nature of the proceedings in Dayton as marked by the state's motivation to enforce a violation of state law). The district court below found the wiser approach to be one that looks to the underlying nature and substance of the proceedings rather than to the initiating party. Brown v. Day, 477 F.Supp.2d 1110, 1116 (D.Kan.2007). I agree. First, the Supreme Court in Dayton likely employed the coercive-remedial distinction to limit the extension of Younger to those administrative proceedingsand only those administrative proceedingsthat are most like Younger itself, which was a criminal case. See Moore v. City of Asheville, N.C., 396 F.3d 385, 393 (4th Cir. 2005) (explaining similarly the Court's extension of Younger only to coercive civil proceedings in Huffman, mindful that the doctrine was originally applied to protect the state interests represented in criminal prosecutions); Patrick J. Smith, Note, The Preemption Dimension of Abstention, 89 Colum. L.Rev. 310, 326-27 (1989) (recognizing the interrelationship between the enforcement nature of state proceedings and the importance of such proceedings to the state). By making the distinction turn on the underlying nature and substance of the administrative proceedings, we can ensure Younger abstention applies only to proceedingslike criminal prosecutionsof paramount importance to the state. The approach that looks to who initiates state administrative process, on the other hand, does not have this advantage. Second, focusing primarily on who initiates administrative process fails to recognize that the labels remedial and coercive can simply be opposite sides of the same coin. If a federal plaintiff initiates a state administrative process, the First Circuit's approach in Kercado-Melendez would call that process remedial. But that federal plaintiff surely felt coerced by the challenged state action he or she is now seeking to remedy. On the flip side, if the government initiates administrative process against a would-be federal plaintiff, Kercado-Melendez would label that process coercive. But that would-be federal plaintiff, forced into the state-initiated administrative proceedings, can also be described as attempting to remedy governmental coercion through the administrative hearing. Kercado-Melendez 's interpretation of the coercive-remedial distinction, while easy to apply, does not explain why it modifies the Younger abstention doctrine. The question we must therefore ask is whether administrative proceedings represent state enforcement effortsregardless of who initiates them. As a leading treatise on federal court jurisdiction suggests, the inquiry is aimed at determining who is  effectively the `plaintiff or the `defendant' before the agencythat is, whether the administrative proceeding was an enforcement action. Richard H. Fallon, Jr. et al., Hart and Wechsler's The Federal Courts and The Federal System 1257 (5th ed.2003) (emphasis added). The majority's approach, instead aligned with Kercado-Melendez, misses the point.