Opinion ID: 18015
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Background and Recent Developments

Text: Of the United States Supreme Court’s Retroactivity Doctrine Although Louisiana judges are called upon to think and act as civil-law jurists when deciding cases under the Louisiana Civil Code, at the same time they are judges in the Anglo-American tradition who are more often engaged in the interpretation and application of law derived from American state, federal, and other Louisiana law sources outside the ambit of the Civil Code. that, because the LPLA is substantive legislation applying prospectively only, Halphen cannot be a retroactively applicable judicial interpretation of previously enacted substantive legislation. Louisiana law and jurisprudence are to the contrary. 29 Consequently, the nature of the entire Louisiana judicial process is also heavily influenced by common-law traditions, United States Supreme Court decisions, and the laws and jurisprudence of other states. The Supreme Court of Louisiana, like courts of other states, gives careful attention to the United States Supreme Court’s opinions explaining common-law traditions and constitutional principles that influence the role of the judiciary and the temporal effects of judicial decisions. Accordingly, we must take those opinions into account in our effort to ascertain the probable course of future developments in the Louisiana doctrine of retroactivity. The general principle that statutes operate prospectively and judicial decisions apply retroactively had been followed by the common law and the Supreme Court’s decisions “for near a thousand years.” Kuhn v. Fairmont Coal Co., 215 U.S. 349, 372 (1910) (Holmes, J., dissenting); see Robinson v. Neil, 409 U.S. 505, 507 (1973); Rivers v. Roadway Express, Inc., 511 U.S. 298, 311-12 (1944).5 The Supreme Court, in Linkletter v. Walker, 381 U.S. 618 5 Justice Scalia, concurring in Harper v. Virginia Department of Taxation, 509 U.S. 86, 107 (1993) (Scalia, J., concurring), explained the traditional judicial role as follows: The conception of the judicial role that [Chief Justice John Marshall] possessed, and that was shared by succeeding generations of American judges until very recent times, took it to be “the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 177 (1803) (emphasis added) -- not what the law shall be. That original and enduring American perception of the judicial role sprang not from the philosophy of Nietzsche but from the jurisprudence of Blackstone, which viewed 30 (1965), however, developed a doctrine under which it could deny retroactive effect to a newly announced rule of criminal constitutional law. According to Linkletter, a decision to limit the new rule to prospective application could be based upon a balancing of the purpose of the new rule, the reliance placed upon the previous view of the law, and the effect on the administration of justice of a retrospective application. Id. at 636 (limiting Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961)). In the federal noncriminal law context, the Supreme Court retroactivity as an inherent characteristic of the judicial power, a power “not delegated to pronounce a new law, but to maintain and expound the old one.” 1 W. BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES 69 (1765). Even when a “former determination is most evidently contrary to reason . . . [or] contrary to the divine law,” a judge overruling that decision would “not pretend to make a new law, but to vindicate the old one from misrepresentation.” Id. at 69-70. “For if it be found that the former decision is manifestly absurd or unjust, it is declared, not that such a sentence was bad law, but that it was not law.” Id. at 70 (emphasis in original). Fully retroactive decisionmaking was considered a principal distinction between the judicial and the legislative power: “[I]t is said that that which distinguishes a judicial from a legislative act is, that the one is a determination of what the existing law is in relation to some existing thing already done or happened, while the other is a predetermination of what the law shall be for the regulation of all future cases.” T. COOLEY, CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITATIONS 91. The critics of the traditional rule of full retroactivity were well aware that it was grounded in what one of them contemptuously called “another fiction known as the Separation of powers.” Kocourek, Retrospective Decisions and Stare Decisis and a Proposal, 17 A.B.A.J. 180, 181 (1931). 31 similarly recognized that a judicial decision could be applied nonretroactively if it established a new principle of law, if such a limitation would avoid substantial inequitable results, and if retrospective application would not retard the purpose and effect of the new rule. Chevron Oil Co. v. Huson, 404 U.S. 97, 106-07 (1971). In Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U.S. 314 (1987), the Supreme Court overruled Linkletter and held that all newly declared rules of law must be applied retroactively to all criminal cases pending on direct review. Id. at 322. The Court based its decision on two basic norms of constitutional adjudication, viz., first, that the nature of judicial review strips a court of the quintessentially legislative prerogative to make rules of law retroactive or prospective within its discretion; and, second, that selective application of new rules of law violates the principle of treating similarly situated parties the same. Id. at 323.6 Dictum in Griffith, stating that “civil retroactivity . . . continue[d] to be governed by the standard announced in Chevron Oil[,]” id. at 322 n.8, caused the Court to divide over its meaning in subsequent cases. In American Trucking Associations, Inc. v. Smith, 496 U.S. 167 (1990), Justice O’Connor, writing for a plurality of four justices, explicitly refused to extend Griffith to civil cases, and used the Chevron Oil test to limit retroactivity of the Court’s 6 In Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989), a plurality of the Court concluded that new constitutional rules of criminal procedure would not be applied retroactively in habeas corpus proceedings unless the rule fell within one of two narrow exceptions. 32 decision in an earlier case invalidating highway use taxes under the Commerce Clause. Id. at 179. Four other justices rejected the plurality’s approach to retroactivity as “anomalous” and refused to hold that “the law applicable to a particular case is that law which the parties believe in good faith to be applicable to the case.” Id. at 219 (Stevens, J., joined by Brennan, J., Marshall, J., and Blackmun, J., dissenting). Justice Scalia, concurring in the judgment because he believed that the new rule of law was incorrect, explicitly disagreed with Justice O’Connor’s retroactivity analysis, stating that “prospective decisionmaking is incompatible with the judicial role, which is to say what the law is, not to prescribe what it shall be.” Id. at 201 (Scalia, J., concurring). In James B. Beam Distilling Co. v. Georgia, 501 U.S. 529 (1991), the Court failed to produce a unified opinion for the Court, but a majority agreed that a rule of federal law, once announced and applied to the parties to the controversy, must be given full retroactive effect to all others not barred by res judicata or statutes of limitation; and that the theory of selective prospectivity must be abandoned in civil cases.7 7 Justice Souter explained the methodology of retroactive, selectively prospective, and purely prospective applications of judicial decisions as follows: As a matter purely of judicial mechanics, there are three ways in which the choice-of-law problem may be resolved. First, a decision may be made fully retroactive, applying both to the parties before the court and to all others by and against whom claims may be pressed, consistent with res judicata and procedural barriers such as statutes of 33 limitations. This practice is overwhelmingly the norm, and is in keeping with the traditional function of the courts to decide cases before them based upon their best current understanding of the law. It also reflects the declaratory theory of law, according to which the courts are understood only to find the law, not to make it. But in some circumstances retroactive application may prompt difficulties of a practical sort. However much it comports with our received notions of the judicial role, the practice has been attacked for its failure to take account of reliance on cases subsequently abandoned, a fact of life if not always one of jurisprudential recognition. Second, there is the purely prospective method of overruling, under which a new rule is applied neither to the parties in the law-making decision nor to those others against or by whom it might be applied to conduct or events occurring before that decision. The case is decided under the old law but becomes a vehicle for announcing the new, effective with respect to all conduct occurring after the date of that decision. This Court has, albeit infrequently, resorted to pure prospectivity, although in so doing it has never been required to distinguish the remedial from the choice-of-law aspect of its decision. This approach claims justification in its appreciation that [t]he past cannot always be erased by a new judicial declaration, and that to apply the new rule to parties who relied on the old would offend basic notions of justice and fairness. But this equitable method has its own drawback: it tends to relax the force of precedent, by minimizing the costs of overruling, and thereby allows the courts to act with a freedom comparable to that of legislatures. Finally, a court may apply a new rule in the case in which it is pronounced, then return to the old one with respect to all others arising on facts predating the pronouncement. This method, which we may call modified, or selective, prospectivity, enjoyed its temporary ascendancy in the criminal law during a period in which the Court formulated new rules, prophylactic or otherwise, to 34 Justice Souter, whose lead opinion garnered the most support, reasoned that the equality principle of Griffith (that similarly situated litigants should be treated the same) carries comparable or greater strength in the civil context, requiring that: (1) the possibility of selective prospectivity be rejected in civil cases; insure protection of the rights of the accused. On the one hand, full retroactive application of holdings such as those announced in Miranda v. Arizona, Escobedo v. Illinois, and Katz v. United States, would have seriously disrupt[ed] the administration of our criminal laws[,] . . . requir[ing] the retrial or release of numerous prisoners found guilty by trustworthy evidence in conformity with previously announced constitutional standards. On the other hand, retroactive application could hardly have been denied the litigant in the law-changing decision itself. A criminal defendant usually seeks one thing only on appeal, the reversal of his conviction; future application would provide little in the way of solace. In this context, without retroactivity at least to the first successful litigant, the incentive to seek review would be diluted if not lost altogether. But selective prospectivity also breaches the principle that litigants in similar situations should be treated the same, a fundamental component of stare decisis and the rule of law generally. For this reason, we abandoned the possibility of selective prospectivity in the criminal context in Griffith v. Kentucky, even where the new rule constituted a clear break with previous law, in favor of completely retroactive application of all decisions to cases pending on direct review. Though Griffith was held not to dispose of the matter of civil retroactivity, selective prospectivity appears never to have been endorsed in the civil context. This case presents the issue. Id. at 535-38 (internal citations omitted). 35 and (2) when a court has applied a new rule of law to the litigants in the case before it, that application necessarily is a retroactive application of the rule to a cause of action based on events predating its adjudication, and therefore must be applied with equality to all similarly situated litigants, except as to rights acquired by them through the operation of res judicata or statutes of limitation, due to the need for finality and an end to litigation. Three justices dissented, defending the practices of both pure and selective prospective application of decisions and the continued viability of the Chevron Oil test. Id. at 549 (O’Connor, J., joined by Rehnquist, C.J., and Kennedy, J., dissenting). In Harper v. Virginia Department of Taxation, 509 U.S. 86 (1993), Justice Thomas authored a five-member majority opinion expressly adopting a rule that “fairly reflects the position of a majority of Justices in Beam”: When this Court applies a rule of federal law to the parties before it, that rule is the controlling interpretation of federal law and must be given full retroactive effect in all cases still open on direct review and as to all events, regardless of whether such events predate or postdate our announcement of the rule. This rule extends Griffith’s ban against “selective application of new rules.” Mindful of the “basic norms of constitutional adjudication” that animated our view of retroactivity in the criminal context, we now prohibit the erection of selective temporal barriers to the application of federal law in noncriminal cases. In both civil and criminal cases, we can scarcely permit “the substantive law [to] shift and spring” according to the “particular equities of [individual parties’] claims” of actual reliance on an old rule and of harm from a retroactive application of the new rule. Our approach to retroactivity heeds the admonition that 36 “[t]he Court has no more constitutional authority in civil cases than in criminal cases to disregard current law or to treat similarly situated litigants differently.” Id. at 97 (internal citations omitted). Justice O’Connor, joined by the Chief Justice, dissented from the Court’s rejection of the use of prospective retroactivity under the Chevron Oil test, and expressed concern that the forgoing language and another statement in Justice Thomas’s majority opinion “intimates that pure prospectivity may be prohibited as well.” Id. at 115 (O’Connor, J., joined by Rehnquist, C.J., dissenting). Justices Kennedy and White, concurred in part, disagreeing with that aspect of the majority opinion and expressing their continuing view that pure prospectivity will be appropriate sometimes in the civil context. Id. at 110 (Kennedy, J., joined by White, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment). The Supreme Court in Reynoldsville Casket Co. v. Hyde, 514 U.S. 749 (1995), held that under Harper its decision in Bendix Autolite Corp. v. Midwesco Enterprises, Inc., 486 U.S. 888 (1988), must be applied retroactively to plaintiff Hyde’s lawsuit filed in 1987 arising out of a 1984 vehicular accident, and that the Supremacy Clause of the Federal Constitution bars Ohio from applying its tolling statute to pre-Bendix torts and thus requires reversal of the Ohio Supreme Court’s refusal to apply Bendix retroactively. In Bendix, the Court had held unconstitutional (as impermissibly burdening interstate commerce) an Ohio “tolling” provision that, in effect, gave Ohio tort plaintiffs unlimited time to sue out-of-state (but not in-state) defendants. The 37 Reynoldsville Casket Co. Court accepted Hyde’s acknowledgment that Harper: held that, when (1) the Court decides a case and applies the (new) legal rule of that case to the parties before it, then (2) it and other courts must treat that same (new) legal rule as “retroactive,” applying it, for example, to all pending cases, whether or not those cases involve predecision events. Hyde, 514 U.S. at 752. Also, the court accepted Hyde’s concessions that, as “‘a result of Harper, there is no question that Bendix retroactively invalidated’ the tolling provision that makes her suit timely[,]” id., and that Harper overruled Chevron Oil insofar as the case (selectively) permitted the prospective-only application of a new rule of law. Id. Nevertheless, Hyde argued that the Ohio Supreme Court holding that Bendix may not be retroactively applied to bar claims in state courts which had accrued prior to the Bendix decision should be viewed simply as an effort to fashion a remedy that takes into consideration her reliance on pre-Bendix law, under the authority of a recharacterization of Chevron Oil as a case in which the Court simply took reliance interests into account in tailoring an appropriate remedy for a violation of federal law. The Court rejected Hyde’s argument because she “offers no more than simple reliance (of the sort at issue in Chevron Oil) as a basis for creating an exception to Harper’s rule of retroactivity -- in other words, she claims that, for no special reason, Harper does not apply.” Id. at 759. In so doing, the Court distinguished several examples upon which Hyde relied, as instances in which courts 38 applying “retroactively” a new rule of law to pending cases, for well-established reasons, found that the new rule did not determine the outcome of the case. Thus, a court may find (1) an alternative way of curing the constitutional violation, or (2) a previously existing, independent legal basis (having nothing to do with retroactivity) for denying relief, or (3) as in the law of qualified immunity, a well-established general legal rule that trumps the new rule of law, which general rule reflects both reliance interests and other significant policy justifications, or (4) a principle of law, such as that of “finality” present in the Teague context, that limits the principle of retroactivity itself. But, this case [where a concern about reliance alone has led the Ohio court to create what amounts to and ad hoc exemption from retroactivity [id. at 758]] involves no such instance[.] Id. Evidently, the Supreme Court has concluded that the Linkletter and Chevron Oil departures from traditional retroactivity doctrine proved unsatisfactory. The Court’s most recent decisions substantially reject those departures and return to the general rule of adjudicative retroactivity, leaving only an indistinct possibility of the application of pure prospectivity in an extremely unusual and unforeseeable case. See Jill E. Fisch, Retroactivity and Legal Change: An Equilibrium Approach, 110 HARV. L. REV. 1056, 1059 (1997).