Opinion ID: 196227
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: The Ripeness Paradigm

Text: 24 We turn now to the more vexing of the two issues presented in this appeal. Since section 7(2)(b 1/2) will not directly affect Keenan's stipend until the year 2002, the district court determined that his claim lacked the ripeness necessary to confer justiciability. See Riva, 871 F.Supp. at 1517-18. Before evaluating this determination, we scout the legal landscape. 25 When a litigant seeks relief that is primarily prospective in character, questions of ripeness are analyzed under a familiar framework that considers the fitness of the issue for immediate review and the hardship to the litigant should review be postponed. See Abbott Labs. v. Gardner, 387 U.S. 136, 148-49, 87 S.Ct. 1507, 1515-16, 18 L.Ed.2d 681 (1967); Ernst & Young, 45 F.3d at 535. The fitness branch of the paradigm typically involves subsidiary queries concerning finality, definiteness, and the extent to which resolution of the challenge depends on facts that may not yet be sufficiently developed. Ernst & Young, 45 F.3d at 535. One critical component is whether the claim involves uncertain and contingent events that may not occur as anticipated or may not occur at all. Massachusetts Ass'n of Afro-Am. Police, Inc. v. Boston Police Dep't, 973 F.2d 18, 20 (1st Cir.1992) (per curiam). A second important factor in the fitness calculus is the extent to which the claim is bound up in the facts. Courts are more likely to find a claim ripe if it is of an intrinsically legal nature, see, e.g., Pacific Gas & Elec. Co. v. State Energy Resources Conserv. & Dev. Comm'n, 461 U.S. 190, 201, 103 S.Ct. 1713, 1720-21, 75 L.Ed.2d 752 (1983), and less likely to do so if the absence of a concrete factual situation seriously inhibits the weighing of competing interests, see, e.g., California Bankers Ass'n v. Shultz, 416 U.S. 21, 56, 94 S.Ct. 1494, 1515, 39 L.Ed.2d 812 (1974). 26 A third salient factor that enters into the assessment of fitness involves the presence or absence of adverseness. See State of R.I. v. Narragansett Indian Tribe, 19 F.3d 685, 692-93 (1st Cir.), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 115 S.Ct. 298, 130 L.Ed.2d 211 (1994). In the context of prospective relief, this factor focuses on whether the facts alleged, under all the circumstances, show that there is a substantial controversy, between parties having adverse legal interests, of sufficient immediacy and reality to warrant the issuance of a declaratory judgment. Maryland Casualty Co. v. Pacific Coal & Oil Co., 312 U.S. 270, 273, 61 S.Ct. 510, 512, 85 L.Ed. 826 (1941). Whether a particular case passes the test of adverseness may be influenced by a variety of considerations, such as whether all affected parties are before the court, see Ernst & Young, 45 F.3d at 538-39, and whether the controversy as framed permits specific relief through a decree of a conclusive character, as distinguished from an opinion advising what the law would be upon a hypothetical state of facts, Aetna Life Ins. Co. v. Haworth, 300 U.S. 227, 241, 57 S.Ct. 461, 464, 81 L.Ed. 617 (1937). 27 The hardship prong of the Abbott Labs. paradigm turns on whether the challenged action creates a 'direct and immediate' dilemma for the parties[.] W.R. Grace & Co. v. U.S.E.P.A., 959 F.2d 360, 364 (1st Cir.1992) (citation omitted). Utility is the flip side of the same coin, and an inquiring court, in assaying the hardship to the parties, may find it revealing to ask whether granting relief would serve a useful purpose, or, put another way, whether the sought-after declaration would be of practical assistance in setting the underlying controversy to rest. Narragansett Indian Tribe, 19 F.3d at 693. 28 Although it is a familiar bromide that courts should not labor to protect a party against harm that is merely remote or contingent, see, e.g., Ernst & Young, 45 F.3d at 536; Massachusetts Ass'n of Afro-Am. Police, 973 F.2d at 20; Lincoln House v. Dupre, 903 F.2d 845, 847 (1st Cir.1990), there is some play in the joints. For example, even when the direct application of a statute is open to a charge of remoteness by reason of a lengthy, built-in time delay before the statute takes effect, ripeness may be found as long as the statute's operation is inevitable (or nearly so). See, e.g., Regional Rail Reorg. Act Cases, 419 U.S. 102, 142-43, 95 S.Ct. 335, 357-58, 42 L.Ed.2d 320 (1974). And, even when the direct application of such a statute is subject to some degree of contingency, the statute may impose sufficiently serious collateral injuries that an inquiring court will deem the hardship component satisfied. See Erwin Chemerinsky, Federal Jurisdiction Sec. 2.4.2, at 121-22 (2d ed. 1994). In general, collateral effects can rise to this level when a statute indirectly permits private action that causes present harm, or when a party must decide currently whether to expend substantial resources that would be largely or entirely wasted if the issue were later resolved in an unfavorable way. See, e.g., Pacific Gas, 461 U.S. at 201, 103 S.Ct. at 1720-21; Duke Power Co. v. Carolina Envtl. Study Group, Inc., 438 U.S. 59, 81-82, 98 S.Ct. 2620, 2634-35, 57 L.Ed.2d 595 (1978). We caution, however, that in such murky waters generalizations are dangerous, and the weighing of collateral effects is for the most part a judgment call, to be made case by case.