Opinion ID: 1885183
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 20

Heading: Did a Case or Controversy Exist?

Text: Another reason this Court can question the circuit court's subject-matter jurisdiction in this case is the fact that during this case and particularly the period within which an appeal of the Liability Order could have been taken to this Court, the parties were not adverse to one another; therefore, no case or controversy existed. Chief Justice Hooper described much of the problem with respect to this issue in his 1997 dissent. If the case was not a sham, it certainly has the appearance of one. Ex parte James, 713 So.2d at 896 (Hooper, C.J., dissenting). I will review the main events that demonstrate the lack of a controversy in this case. The history of the realignment of parties in this case is as follows. Originally, Governor Guy Hunt was a defendant, along with State Director of Finance Robin Swift, Lieutenant Governor James Folsom, Jr., Speaker of the House of Representatives James Clark, State Superintendent of Education Wayne Teague, and the members of the Alabama State Board of Education. Later, all the defendants except Governor Hunt and his finance director were realigned as plaintiffs. Why? Because those defendants agreed with the position advanced by ACE. The attorney general at the time, Jimmy Evans, indicted Governor Hunt and obtained a felony conviction after the trial judge had issued his Liability Order, which declared unconstitutional the State's method of funding education. Governor Hunt's conviction forced him from office on April 22, 1993, and Lieutenant Governor James Folsom, Jr., became governor. On June 9, 1993, the trial judge purported to certify the March 31, 1993, order as final under Rule 54(b). [44] Then another realignment occurred. On May 28, 1993, Speaker Clark, Superintendent Teague, and the members of the Board of Education were realigned as defendants in their official capacitiesagain. On June 8, 1993, Governor Folsom was substituted as a defendant in place of former Governor Hunt. Folsom's finance director then replaced Governor Hunt's finance director as a defendant. [45] Why would these people return to being defendants? Had they not just recently realigned as plaintiffs? A governor who agreed with the position advanced by the plaintiffs was now in office. To say that the office itself, not the individual occupying that office, was the party defies logic; an office can assert neither a favorable nor unfavorable position without the person who directs its actions. The alignment of plaintiffs and the defendants in the Equity Funding Case ended this waythose defendants who agreed with the plaintiffs and therefore had realigned as plaintiffs later re-realigned as defendants when Folsom became governor. No one was adverse to anyone in the case, i.e., no justiciable controversy existed, and the case should have been dismissed. Alabama Nursing Home Ass'n v. Alabama State Health Planning Agency, 554 So.2d 1032, 1033 (Ala.Civ.App. 1989) (`[T]he circuit courts of this state do not have jurisdiction to issue advisory opinions when there is no case or controversy presented.'). The question of the existence of a case or controversy is not an idle debate. That there be an actual controversy between parties that appear before a court has from time immemorial been a bedrock judicial principle. The question involves the foundational principles upon which our tripartite form of constitutional government was formed. This Court has stated: [O]ur Constitution vests this Court with a limited judicial power that entails the special competence to decide discrete cases and controversies involving particular parties and specific facts. Ala. Const.1901, amend. 328, § 6.01 (vesting the judicial power in the Unified Judicial System); see, e.g., Copeland v. Jefferson County, 284 Ala. 558, 561, 226 So.2d 385, 387 (1969) (stating that courts decide only concrete controversies between adverse parties). Alabama Power Co. v. Citizens of Alabama, 740 So.2d 371, 381 (Ala.1999) (emphasis added). See also Jefferson County v. Johnson, 232 Ala. 406, 406-07, 168 So. 450, 451 (1936), in which this Court stated: The weight of authority is that, to give the court jurisdiction to render a declaratory judgment, there must be `a bona fide existing controversy, with subject-matter and parties in interest in court, and a situation where adequate relief is not presently available through medium of other existing forms of action.' Union Trust Co. of Rochester v. Main & South Streets Holding Corporation, 245 App.Div. 369, 282 N.Y.S. 428, 429 [headnote 2]; 33 Corpus Juris, p. 1097, § 57. This matter ceased to be a controversy, if in fact it ever was one, when Governor Hunt was removed from office. [46] At that point, no adversary relationship existed before or after certification of the final order, thereby denying the trial court the opportunity to hear a full debate of the issues and to fully adjudicate the matters in question. The Equity Funding Case is a classic example of a nonjusticiable controversy; clearly, the trial court lacked jurisdiction to issue an order where no controversy existed.