Opinion ID: 6929139
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Court’s March 1993 Order

Text: In its March 10, 1993 order, the Pennsylvania Supreme -Court reached the legal conclusion that “[t]he temporary assignment of a retired judge to judicial service is a matter solely, within the discretion of this Court, and any such assignment may be revoked for any reason at this Court’s discretion.” In our view, this order represents the culmination of the court’s actions with respect to Judge Guarino, adjudicating Judge Guarino’s legal claims and thus rendering the actions of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unreviewable. Although the court did not refer to precedent and provided no detailed rationale for its conclusions, neither did the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in Feldman. See 460 U.S. at 468, 472, 480-82, 103 S.Ct. at 1307, 1309, 1314. Thus, the March 10 order met the Feldman/Blake requirements for an adjudication—it applied Pennsylvania state law to determine that Judge Guarino had no property right in his job and’no right to any removal process different from the one the court used in issuing its November order. 4 The Pennsylvania Supreme Court did not specifically address or decide Judge Guari-no’s constitutional claims. Neither did the Feldman Court refer to each of Feldman’s specific claims when it issued its per curiam order. But whereas Feldman had raised his legal claims in a petition to the court and the court had issued an overarching decision denying Feldman’s admission to the bar and thus implicitly denying all of his legal claims, Judge Guarino raised no legal claims before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and thus the Court did not inherently have to consider and decide Judge Guarino’s constitutional ■ claims. Hence, the fact that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reached an ultimate conclusion with respect to the revocation of Judge Guarino’s assignment to senior judge status does not necessarily mean that it adjudicated his constitutional claims. Yet while the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did not specifically address Judge Guarino’s constitutional claims, by deciding, that revocation of his assignment was solely within its discretion, the court decided that he had no property right to senior judge status under state law and in essence decided that its November order did not deprive Judge Guar-ino of “property” without due process of law. Because Judge Guarino’s claim that he was deprived of property without due process of law was “inextricably intertwined” with his state law claim that he has a property right to his position, the March 10th order essentially constitutes an adjudication of that constitutional claim. See Feldman, 460 U.S. at 483 n. 16, 103 S.Ct. at 1315 n. 16. But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court may very well not have adjudicated Judge Guarino’s liberty based due process claim, because there is a strong argument that this claim is not inextricably tied to the state law issues explicitly decided by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. However, we hold that Judge Guarino waived this claim by failing to present it at the March show cause hearing. When a litigant expects that a court is willing to consider its legal claims, raises some of those claims, and has those claims adjudicated, it makes sense to apply normal principles of claim preclusion to hold that the litigant has waived any legal claims he or she fails to raise which have arisen from the same transaction as those claims a litigant did raise. This is exactly the type of situation the Court was considering in n. 16 of Feldman when it indicated that “[b]y failing to raise his claims in state court a plaintiff may forfeit his right to obtain review of the state-court decision in any federal court.” See id. at 482 n. 16, 103 S.Ct. at 1302 n. 16. However, not all of the conditions alluded to above are present here. Before the supreme court issued its March order, there was little objective evidence that the court was willing to consider any of Judge Guari-no’s legal claims at all. On February 26, 1993, the court issued its order directing Judge Guarino to appear before it on March 9 to “show cause why the order entered on November 10 ... should not remain in full force and effect.” This order is facially ambiguous. Because the March order was issued by the same body that had issued the initial administrative order, was docketed as an administrative proceeding, and did not reference any rule that Judge Guarino had allegedly violated, it could reasonably be interpreted merely as having offered Judge Guarino the opportunity to persuade the Pennsylvania Supreme Court why in fairness the court should exercise its administrative discretion differently. On the other hand, the wording of the order is broad enough that it could be interpreted as having offered Judge Guarino the opportunity to argue that the earlier administrative action of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had violated both Pennsylvania law and the United States Constitution. In other words, the order could be interpreted as having offered Judge Guarino an opportunity for full scale adjudication. Because no mandate in statute or court rule established such a hearing, and the hearing was, to our knowledge, a unique occurrence, the parties had no background information available at the time the order was issued to clear up the ambiguous wording of the order. 5 Thus, a reasonable person could easily have believed that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had no inclination to decide legal issues at the March show cause hearing. Moreover, unlike the litigant discussed in n. 16 of Feldman, Judge Guarino did not raise any legal claims before the state supreme court; thus, there is little evidence that Judge Guarino subjectively expected the state supreme court to adjudicate his legal claims. Given that Judge Guarino had no clear reason to believe that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was willing to entertain either his state law claims or his constitutional claims, it is not immediately apparent why it makes sense to hold that Judge Guarino waived his constitutional claims by not raising them. Nonetheless, we hold that Judge Guarino did waive his constitutional claims by failing to raise them, for he should have looked on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s issuance of the show cause order as providing a chance for him to present his legal arguments even though it was not clear -from the face of the order that such an opportunity would exist. When the “administrator” making a decision is a state supreme court and that state supreme court presents a litigant with an opportunity to present arguments to the court, it is reasonable for a party to expect that such a body will entertain constitutional challenges to its actions and to expect litigants to be on notice of this possibility, even if the state court seems to be acting in an administrative capacity. 6 When a litigant fails to attempt to raise such claims, it is appropriate to presume that the state court would have been willing to decide his constitutional claims subject to rebuttal by clear evidence to the contrary. Cf. Pennzoil Co. v. Texaco, 481 U.S. 1, 15, 107 S.Ct. 1519, 1528, 95 L.Ed.2d 1 (1987) (holding that while Younger abstention is only justified if the pending state proceeding has the authority to adjudicate a litigant’s federal claims, “when a litigant has not attempted to present his federal claims in related state-court proceedings, a federal court should assume that state procedures will afford an adequate remedy in the absence of unambiguous authority to the contrary.”) 7 Judge Guarino’s uncertainty as to whether the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would have considered his constitutional claims is due solely to his own failure to attempt to raise those claims. A litigant suffers no real harm by attempting to raise his or her constitutional claim in state court: if the state court refuses to address the constitutional claim, the litigant can then raise the claim in federal court without any jurisdictional, abstention, or collateral estoppel problems. Requiring the-litigant to attempt to raise those claims is relatively innocuous; we therefore hold that Judge Guarino waived his opportunity to ensure that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court adjudicated all of his legal claims. 8