Opinion ID: 721330
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Standard of Facial Invalidity

Text: 61 As it treated the question of standing, so the panel summarily opted for the jurisprudential approach of striking down the Mississippi school prayer statute on its face, in toto, rather than deferring a constitutional law decision until the statute has actually been applied. Facial constitutionality analysis was justified in a footnote with two citations. Ingebretsen, 88 F.3d at 279 n. 2. In my view, this technique misfires because plaintiffs cannot plausibly maintain that there is no set of circumstances under which the statute may be constitutionally applied. 62 The reasons for a distinction between facial and as applied challenges--and for a court's disavowing promiscuous declarations of facial invalidity--seem obvious. Courts owe heavy deference to legislative enactments and to the presumption that legislators can independently gauge their constitutionality. The doctrine of facial invalidity obtains where no narrowing construction of a statute can save it. United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 744, 107 S.Ct. 2095, 2100, 95 L.Ed.2d 697 (1987). In First Amendment free speech cases, declarations of facial invalidity have been more frequent, although still imposed cautiously, because of the chilling effect such laws might have on free expression, an effect not claimed by plaintiffs here. Id. Even in an abortion case, this court has refused to declare a statute facially unconstitutional. Barnes v. Mississippi, 992 F.2d 1335, 1342 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 510 U.S. 976, 114 S.Ct. 468, 126 L.Ed.2d 419 (1993). 10 63 Establishment Clause cases do not deviate from this rule of judicial restraint. There is precedent for both facial and as-applied challenges to statutes on Establishment Clause grounds, but the Supreme Court has acknowledged that it has not delineated the consequences of those two approaches. Bowen v. Kendrick, 487 U.S. 589, 602, 108 S.Ct. 2562, 2570, 101 L.Ed.2d 520 (1988). Bowen, however, upheld on its face the Adolescent Family Life Act, which permitted federal funding of religious organizations for adolescent sexual counseling. The Court remanded for a more discriminating consideration of the statute's validity as applied. Significantly, in other cases where the Court has held statutes facially to represent an unconstitutional establishment, there was no room for a narrowing construction; each such statute dictated the state's unconstitutional involvement with religion. 11 64 In contrast with statutes susceptible to no narrowing construction, the essence of the School Prayer Statute, even more than in Bowen, is the manifold variety of its possible constructions and applications. The amount and type of state involvement with voluntary student prayer is unforeseeable because invocation of the statute depends not on the state but on private students. It would be ludicrous to assert, and the panel did not attempt to do so, that there is no set of circumstances under which the Mississippi prayer statute can be upheld. Salerno, supra. In fact, the court conceded the statute's validity as applied to graduation prayers pursuant to Jones v. Clear Creek ISD, 977 F.2d 963 (5th Cir.1992), cert. denied, 508 U.S. 967, 113 S.Ct. 2950, 124 L.Ed.2d 697 (1993), and it must be constitutional to facilitate student prayer as permitted in Doe v. Duncanville II, supra. 65 Critically, holding the statute not facially invalid or deferring consideration of facial validity is a different matter than facially upholding it across the board in every possible way. Only experience with the statute would tell whether it fulfills the promise of empowering student-initiated free speech/free exercise of religion or is misused to compel state-sponsored prayer. The panel's decision to strike down the entire statute preemptively expanded its authority at the expense of the legislature and unwarrantedly limited the legislature's flexibility to run Mississippi's schools.