Court Opinion

ID: 9471952
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:44:53.858501+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:39.481445
License: Public Domain

PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judge,
with whom GARWOOD and JOLLY, Circuit Judges, join, specially concurring:
I concur in the result reached by Judge Williams, but do not agree that the difficult issues now before us can be avoided by deciding whether the district court abused its discretion. We cannot enjoy that comfort of non-decision. Discretion implies a choice of courses. The consent decree proposed illegal racial discrimination and the only permissible course was to refuse the proposed settlement.
I
Of course, our Constitution has as an objective a color-blind society, but its *1566means include the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and each measures its proscriptions in part by considerations of race. Judge Wisdom is then indisputably correct in contending that in a normative sense, we are forever race bound. Racial discrimination is a specific failure to recognize the worth of the individual, a prime ideal of our constitutional structure. The vision, as I will argue, is that we are a nation of persons, not groups. Indeed, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments are confessions of failures to value persons individually. But whatever the power of the Congress to allow courts to adopt remedial decrees in their explication, framed in group terms in response to proved group treatment, our first question is whether the Congress has done so.
II
The legislative history of Title VII makes plain that, as Senator Humphrey put it:
[T]here is nothing in [the proposed Bill] that will give any power to the Commission or to any court to require hiring, firing, or promotion of employees in order to meet a racial “quota” or to achieve a certain racial balance---- That bugaboo has been brought up a dozen times; but it is nonexistent.
110 Cong.Rec, 6549 (1964). But see E.E.O.C. v. American Tel. & Tel. Co., 556 F.2d 167 (3d Cir.1977), cert. denied 438 U.S. 915, 98 S.Ct. 3145, 57 L.Ed.2d 1161 (1979). The legislative history was summarized by Justice Rehnquist in United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193, 219, 99 S.Ct. 2721, 2735, 61 L.Ed.2d 480 (1979) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting). While that dissent did not carry the Court in Weber, the majority walked past it in its emphasis that the sole question was whether Congress intended “an absolute prohibition against all private, voluntary, race-conscious affirmative action efforts to hasten the elimination of such vestiges.” Id. at 204, 99 S.Ct. at 2727. In doing so the Weber majority conceded, as indeed it was forced to, that Title VII would not require “racially preferential integration efforts.” Id. at 205-06, 99 S.Ct. at 2728. The Court emphasized that “[t]he Section does not state that ‘nothing in Title VII shall be interpreted to permit’ voluntary affirmative efforts to correct racial imbalances.” Id. at 206, 99 S.Ct. at 2728 (emphasis in original). In sum, the Weber Court decided only “that Congress did not intend to limit traditional business freedom to such a degree as to prohibit all voluntary, race-conscious affirmative action.” Id. at 207, 99 S.Ct. at 2729.
That the Weber Court to this extent left traditional management prerogatives open and allowed the free market in hiring to function does not answer our question. Our question is instead whether requiring the City of New Orleans to promote one black for every white, whether or not the favored black was ever a victim of discrimination, until a specific quota is achieved is a permissible judicially-imposed remedy. The legislative history of Title VII answers this question in clear terms. Such a practice cannot be required.1
It does not matter that the case was not tried to conclusion. If the class had proved its contention that the City had discriminated in its promotion practices, the permissible remedies would have included back-pay and rightful place for all class members denied promotions. Nothing in the history of Title VII, or otherwise, justifies the jump from such permissible relief to that of what can fairly be described as an obligation to proportionally employ. The remedy simply does not address the wrong.
Wrong and remedy are best wed by candidly surfacing the targeted wrong. A quota which injures persons not participating in accused segregation patterns to the *1567benefit of persons who were not its victims is responsive to a wrong defined in terms of a failed social order — of a judicially envisioned distribution of jobs among races, ethnic groups and sexes. Such social ordering is a peculiar use of judicial power because use of judicial power to resolve disputes has traditionally and constitutionally been confined in the main to disputes whose dimensions are drawn by adverse parties.2 Social ordering is a horse once mounted from which it is difficult to dismount because changes in the makeup of populations, overlaid by any job qualification deficits posed by changing industry in given areas, will confound efforts to conclude. Surely our difficulty in attempting to decide when a school district is “unitary” is instructive. Relatedly, cutting back the permissible size of classes under Fed.R.Civ.P. 23, while tolerating decrees that afford relief to persons who were not parties, to the injury of persons who were never wrongdoers, is paradoxical. See General Telephone Company of the Southwest v. Falcon, 457 U.S. 147, 102 S.Ct. 2364, 72 L.Ed.2d 740 (1982). The point is not that courts ought to shrink from duty because its discharge is difficult or controversial. It is instead that the very uniqueness of
what we are doing ought to give pause over whether we have undertaken a legislative rather than a judicial role — also a question of constitutional magnitude.
In sum, the provision rejected by the district court does not respond to the claims of the class members. The committed wrong is not the failure of the employer to maintain a work force in proportion to some SMSA percentage. The illegality is in discriminating against black persons eligible for promotion. So defined, if after each class member was given his rightful place the resulting employee work force should remain less than the SMSA proportion, it is difficult to see how the remedy could be called inadequate.
Ill
The sometimes inscrutable trilogy of Regents of the University of Calif v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 98 S.Ct. 2733, 57 L.Ed.2d 750 (1978); United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193, 99 S.Ct. 2721, 61 L.Ed.2d 480 (1979), and Fullilove v. Klutz-nick, 448 U.S. 448, 100 S.Ct. 2758, 65 L.Ed.2d 902 (1980), at the least require that a state’s use of race to correct a wrong be tailored to that wrong; that is, the plan *1568must be a “limited and properly tailored remedy.” 448 U.S. at 484, n. 72, 100 S.Ct. at 2777, at n. 12. Though Bakke establishes that “race may be taken into account as a factor” in the creation of a remedial plan to counteract previous discrimination, 438 U.S. at 296 n. 36, 99 S.Ct. at 2751 (opinion of Powell, J.), id. at 325, 98 S.Ct. at 2766 (opinion of Brennan, White, Marshall, and Blackmun, JJ.), Fullilove holds that, even when such a plan is adopted only after the most searching and thorough congressional inquiry, culminating in a legislative finding of past discrimination, it must still be subjected to “close examination” by the reviewing court. 448 U.S. at 472, 100 S.Ct. at 2771 (opinion of Burger, C.J.). Chief Justice Burger’s plurality opinion in Fullilove, joined by Justices Powell and White, notes that “[a]ny preference based on racial or ethnic criteria must necessarily receive a most searching examination to make sure that it does not conflict with constitutional guarantees.” Id. at 491, 100 S.Ct. at 2781. Justice Powell wrote a concurring opinion adhering to his endorsement in Bakke of a strict scrutiny standard of review for all racially-based plans. Id. at 495, 100 S.Ct. at 2783. Dissenting, Justice Stewart, joined by Justice Rehnquist, urged that “any official action that treats a person differently on account of his race or ethnic origin is inherently suspect and presumptively invalid.” Id. at 523, 100 S.Ct. at 2797 (Stewart, J., dissenting).
From this multitude of opinions it appears that five Justices in Fullilove would subscribe to the proposition that “a most searching examination” is the minimum standard of scrutiny for a remedial plan that forthrightly employs race as an employment criterion. Weber adds no further insight into this question because the absence of any state action there pretermitted any review of the challenged plan for compliance with the dictates of the Fourteenth Amendment.
We need not, and therefore ought not, reach the question of whether quotas in public employment assertedly responsive to prior discrimination can constitutionally ever include non-victims. The proposed consent decree included numerous other remedial responses to the wrong, including affirmative recruitment of blacks and assistance to them during the recruitment process; scrutiny of all tests for adverse impact; better training of blacks, including tutors; the creation of an “Advisory Review Panel,” half of whom must be black, to review all decisions whether to dismiss or “recycle” a recruit; the immediate promotion of 44 black officers to newly created positions with supervisory responsibility; a prohibition of layoffs of supervisors; and a $300,000 back-pay fund.
The only question we must address in this case is whether the quota is so necessary to the correction of past discriminatory employment practices within the New Orleans Police Department that its adverse impact on present and future non-black officers is justifiable as an unavoidable side-effect of the constitutionally-required remedial process — the unpleasant taste that accompanies necessary medicine. In making this assessment, we must consider the beneficial effect fairly to be expected when the other, unchallenged elements of this consent decree are implemented. It cannot plausibly be contended that a quota which advantages blacks who have not been victims of prior discriminatory practices at the expense of non-black officers who may not have perpetrated or benefited by those practices is the sine qua non of effective relief to bring this department into compliance with the commands of Title VII and the Fourteenth Amendment.
Black individuals have in the past contended against discriminatory employment practices, and it is the function of the courts to fashion appropriate relief for these individuals. The courts must in proper cases also take action necessary to abolish these practices so that additional black individuals will not confront them in the future. But when courts attempt to deal with entire races as though they were unified groups, we betray the dictate of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that race alone should not be used to classify and delimit the individual members of any group. “The rights created by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment are, by its terms, guaranteed to the individ*1569ual. The rights established are personal rights____ Equal protection of the laws is not achieved through indiscriminate imposition of inequalities.” Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1, 22, 68 S.Ct. 836, 846, 92 L.Ed. 1161 (1948) (footnote omitted).
When we lose sight of the need to tie remedy to wrong, we confound the very principles we are striving to vindicate, because we impose burdens and confer benefits along racial lines with no assurance that we are thereby undoing the injustices of the past; rather, by regarding races— and not their individual members — as though they were parties before the court, we perpetrate new injustices in derogation of the right of those benefited and burdened alike to be treated as individuals. In addition, we thereby impair our own ability to express in coherent and cohesive fashion our commitment to the doctrines of individual worth central to our modern constitutional jurisprudence. “If it is the individual who is entitled to judicial protection against classifications based upon his racial or ethnic background because such distinctions impinge upon personal rights, rather than the individual only because of his membership in a particular group, then constitutional standards may be applied consistently.” Bakke, 438 U.S. at 299, 98 S.Ct. at 2752 (opinion of Powell, J.).
The principal failing of the proposed quota is that it regards all members of the black race as a single class, rather than recognizing that the group is composed of individuals, some of whom have suffered the invidious effects of past discrimination and some of whom have not. I have no objection, of course, to grouping those individuals who have suffered some wrong and now prosecute their case on a group basis; this is the traditional application of the class relief doctrine embodied in Fed.R.Civ.P. 23 and ultimately specific affirmative relief will focus on individual class members. What I cannot accept is the notion that “.the black race” is an independent legal entity and that relief for past discrimination against black persons should take the form of special advantages granted in the future to “the black race.” Races, per se, are not proper parties to a court action.
A substantial consideration impelling the Supreme Court to uphold the racially non-neutral contracting scheme challenged in Fullilove was the presence in the legislative scheme of administrative safeguards designed to minimize the imposition of benefits and burdens not justifiable as remedies for past discrimination. 448 U.S. at 486-89, 100 S.Ct. at 2778-2780 (opinion of Burger, C.J.). Here, by contrast, the proposed promoting quota made no effort to correlate prior victim status to future advantage; to be black ipso facto would be to benefit under this plan.
But, the class3 replies, and Judge Wisdom writes, school desegregation cases have not infrequently employed group remedial devices. Judge Wisdom's assertion can hardly be denied. Under our school desegregation jurisprudence, the school districts are either within or without a state of legal grace, termed unitary. By definition, every child in such system is a specific victim of any illegality. Such group remedies never involve the use of quotas in the sense that sole entitlement to relief is a matter of race independent of whether the person was a victim.4
*1570The district court confronted a proposed consent decree, many elements of which are unchallenged and are presumably desirable means of countering the effects of past discrimination. With their presence, whatever be the case if viewed in isolation, the quota was unlawful and inartfully drawn; it was drawn with no effort first to remedy the injury suffered by class members. In sum, this awkward and cumbersome proposed remedy cannot withstand the “searching examination” that it must, at the least, encounter when presented for judicial review. The court’s decision to refuse to approve the decree was proper.
IV
There is nothing in the refusal to allow quota promotions which impedes settlement of Title VII class suits. Had this decree articulated a reasonable mechanism for the identification of putative victims and called for their promotion in an immediate way or over a period of time, it would have been unassailable. The end result might well have been a requirement that the City would have had to promote more black persons than white persons, but that similarity in result masks a fundamental difference in the use of race in a remedial scheme. That difference is defined by the party oriented character of our judiciary and was drawn by the Congress in a compromise which allowed passage of Title VII.
No court order can require hiring, reinstatement, admission to membership, or payment of back-pay for anyone who was not fired, refused employment or advancement or admission to a union by an act of discrimination forbidden by this Title.
H.R.Rep. No. 914, 88th Cong., 2d Sess 62, reprinted in 1964 U.S.Code Cong. & Ad.News 2391.
V
The issues before us today are extraordinarily difficult. They present the seemingly insoluble “social conundrum of nourishing ethnicity in an effort to starve it.” See Vuyanich v. Republic National Bank of Dallas, 505 F.Supp. 224, 394 (N.D.Tex.1980), rev’d, 723 F.2d 1195 (5th Cir.1984). Nevertheless, these issues do not defy rational exposition.
Though I ultimately agree with the result reached by Judge Williams, I cannot accept his suggestion that the proposed hiring quota would have been constitutional and would have been permitted by Title VII had it been approved by the district court. This same objection prevents me from joining Judge Wisdom’s scholarly and masterful dissent. While my views are set forth in greater detail they parallel those expressed by Judge Gee. For these reasons I join in the decision to affirm the rejection by the district court of the proposed consent decree and return the case for trial.

. The argument that the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, Pub.L. No. 92-261, 86 Stat. 103 (1972) adopted judicial construction of the 1964 Act suffers In several respects. First, the judicial construction asscrtcdly adopted was not so plain. Second, it is difficult to find that the Congress intended lo impose on slates and local government employers exposure to quotas which it rejected for private employers eight years earlier. Such a marked shift in congressional purpose would surely have been spoken, if intended.

. It is a classic "polycentric" dispute that sorely taxes the judicial role:
[Sjuppose in a socialist regime it were decided to have all wages and prices set by courts which would proceed after the usual forms of adjudication. It is, I assume, obvious that here is a task that could not successfully be undertaken by the adjudicative method. The point that comes first to mind is that courts move too slowly to keep up with a rapidly changing economic scene. The more fundamental point is that the forms of adjudication cannot encompass and take into account the complex repercussions that may result from any change in prices or wages. A rise in the price of aluminum may affect in varying degrees the demand for, and therefore the proper price of, thirty kinds of steel, twenty kinds of plastics, an infinitude of woods, other metals, etc. Each of these separate effects may have its own complex repercussions in the economy. In such a case it is simply impossible to afford each affected party a meaningful participation through proofs and arguments. It is a matter of capital importance to note that it is not merely a question of the huge number of possibly affected parties, significant as that aspect of the thing may be. A more fundamental point is that each of the various forms that award might take (say, a three-cent increase per pound, a four-cent increase, a five-cent increase, etc.) would have a different set of repercussions and might require in each instance a redefinition of the “parties affected.”
We may visualize this kind of situation by thinking of a spider web. A pull on one strand will distribute tensions after a complicated pattern throughout the web as a whole. Doubling the original pull will, in all likelihood, not simply double each of the resulting tensions but will rather create a different complicated pattern of tensions. This would certainly occur, for example, if the doubled pull caused one or more of the weaker strands to snap. This is a "polycentric" situation because it is "many centered" — each crossing of strands is a distinct center for distributing tensions.
... Here, again, we are dealing with a situation of interacting points of influence and therefore with a polycentric problem beyond the proper limits of adjudication. Fuller, The Forms and Limits of Adjudication, 92 Harv.L.Rev. 353, 394-5; (1978).

. The class was virtually abandoned in the bargained for quota, with no hint as to why. The certified class included only victims:
1. All black persons who have applied for but were denied employment as patrolmen in the New Orleans Police Department.
2. All black persons who arc presently police officers or were formerly police officers, who have been subject to racially discriminatory practices in assignments, promotions, discipline and general treatment by their supervisors and other employees.

. Wc arc learning that much of our school litigation has proceeded with ill-defined and largely ignored classes of litigants. Indeed, in sonic cases we learn after as long as ten years that no class of plaintiffs was ever certified and the originally proffered class representatives, and sometimes their counsel, have long since departed. Attempting to terminate such cases highlights their estrangement from classic party-oriented disputes. Our rules contemplate that a suit has parties. The history of school desegregation in Caddo Parish, Louisiana is illustrative. See Jones v. Caddo Parish School Board, 417 F.2d 801 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 396 U.S. 904, 90 *1570S.Ct. 218, 24 L.Ed.2d 180 (1969); 421 F.2d 313 (5th Cir.1970); 499 F.2d 914 (5th Cir.1974); 704 F.2d 206 (5th Cir.1983), reh’g en banc granted 718 F.2d 120 (5th Cir.1983) (case has proceeded for nearly twenty years with no certified class and its dismissal is now being challenged, in part, for lack of proper notice).