Court Opinion

ID: 9430959
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:31:00.761797+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:16:07.641560
License: Public Domain

Justice Scalia,
concurring in the judgment.
Because I agree with the conclusion of Part III of the Court’s opinion, I find it unnecessary (as should the Court) to reach the “reservoir doctrine” question discussed in Part II. And while I agree with much of the reasoning of Part III, I cannot join it, principally because in my view it does not matter whether the Union intended to represent Royal or Nutter; and if it did matter, I would find inadequate basis for overturning the Board’s factual finding of representational intent. I would affirm the Court of Appeals solely on the ground that the Union had no collective-bargaining agreement covering either Royal or Nutter.
Section 8(b)(1)(B) of the National Labor Relations Act makes it unlawful for a labor union “to restrain or coerce . . . an employer in the selection of his representatives for the purposes of collective bargaining or the adjustment of grievances.” 29 U. S. C. § 158(b)(1)(B). As the Court suggests, the statute by its plain terms governs only the relationship between unions and employers, not the relationship between unions and their members. Further, it pertains to only one aspect of the union-employer relationship: the employer’s selection of a bargaining or grievance adjustment representative. Nonetheless, in American Broadcasting Cos. v. Writers Guild, Inc., 437 U. S. 411 (1978) (ABC), we affirmed the Board’s application of this statute to union discipline of members who cross picket lines in order to perform grievance adjustment work for employers with whom the union has a collective-bargaining contract. The Board now asks us to approve an extension of the statute to a still more remote form of such “restraint” by a union upon employer “selec*597tion” — namely, such restraint directed against an employer with whom the union has no collective-bargaining agreement.
If the question before us were whether, given the deference we owe to agency determinations, the Board’s construction of this Court’s opinion in ABC is a reasonable one, I would agree with the Government that it is. We defer to agencies, however (and thus apply a mere “reasonableness” standard of review) in their construction of their statutes, not of our opinions. The question before us is not whether ABC can reasonably be read to support the Board’s decision, but whether § 8(b)(1)(B) can reasonably be read to support it. It seems to me that ABC and the Board’s prior decision in San Francisco-Oakland Mailers’ Union No. 18 (Northwest Publications, Inc.), 172 N. L. R. B. 2173 (1968), which held that unions violate § 8(b)(1)(B) by disciplining member-representatives for the manner in which they interpret collective-bargaining contracts, represent at best the “outer limits,” Florida Power & Light Co. v. Electrical Workers, 417 U. S. 790, 805 (1974), of any permissible construction of § 8(b)(1)(B). I would certainly go no further, and would accordingly limit the Board’s indirect restraint theory to circumstances in which there is an actual contract between the union and affected employer, without regard to whether the union has an intent to establish such a contract. Of course, as the Court’s opinion points out: “Direct coercion [i. e., real coercion] of an employer’s selection of a § 8(b)(1) (B) representative would always be a § 8(b)(1)(B) violation, whether or not the union has or seeks a bargaining relationship with an employer.” Ante, at 590, n. 13.
The Board’s approach is the product of a familiar phenomenon. Once having succeeded, by benefit of excessive judicial deference, in expanding the scope of a statute beyond a reasonable interpretation of its language, the emboldened agency presses the rationale of that expansion to the limits of its logic. And the Court, having already sanctioned a point *598of departure that is genuinely not to be found within the language of the statute, finds itself cut off from that authoritative source of the law, and ends up construing not the statute but its own construction. Applied to an erroneous point of departure, the logical reasoning that is ordinarily the mechanism of judicial adherence to the rule of law perversely carries the Court further and further from the meaning of the statute. Some distance down that path, however, there comes a point at which a later incremental step, again rational in itself, leads to a result so far removed from the statute that obedience to text must overcome fidelity to logic. Chief Justice Burger’s remarks in United States v. 12 200-ft. Reels of Film, 413 U. S. 123 (1973), are nowhere more applicable than in this context:
“The seductive plausibility of single steps in a chain of evolutionary development of a legal rule is often not perceived until a third, fourth, or fifth ‘logical’ extension occurs. Each step, when taken, appeared a reasonable step in relation to that which preceded it, although the aggregate or end result is one that would never have been seriously considered in the first instance. This kind of gestative propensity calls for the ‘line drawing’ familiar in the judicial, as in the legislative process: ‘thus far but not beyond.’” Id., at 127.
That is the case here. Logic is on the side of the Board, but the statute is with the respondent. I concur in the judgment of the Court.