Court Opinion

ID: 9430398
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:29:39.287697+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:24.354154
License: Public Domain

Justice Marshall,
concurring.
I join Justice Stevens’ opinion for the Court. I write separately to emphasize that the parties cannot, contrary to the contention of the Solicitor General and The Chief Justice, invoke the Article III jurisdiction of this Court through a belated nontestimonial statement by Mr. Youngman that he is a parent of a child in the Williamsport Area High School.
This lawsuit on appeal was not “the same dispute between the same parties,” post, at 551, as the one conducted in the District Court. The dispute litigated in the District Court was one between certain students wishing to conduct prayer group activities as part of an official school activity period, on the one hand, and a School Board that refused them permission to do so, on the other. Mr. Youngman participated in that lawsuit only as a member of the School Board, sued in his official capacity. The real party in interest in that lawsuit was the Board. Kentucky v. Graham, 473 U. S. 159, 165-166 (1985). That controversy ended with the entry of the District Court judgment; the School Board, voting 8-1 with Mr. Youngman in the minority, abandoned its earlier position and agreed to allow plaintiffs to conduct the prayer group activities they sought. There was therefore nothing left to litigate between those parties.
The lawsuit sought to be litigated on appeal is a different one. This dispute, under The Chief Justice’s theory, is *550one between Mr. Youngman, asserting that he is a parent of a child in the Williamsport Area High School whose First Amendment rights would be infringed by his attendance at a school whose activities impermissibly advance religion, on the one hand, and students seeking to conduct prayer group activities, on the other. The School Board itself is nowhere to be found. I do not contest that Mr. Youngman could pursue this dispute on appeal had he intervened in the lawsuit in his capacity as a parent. Absent such intervention, it is conceivable that Mr. Youngman might bottom his standing to raise such an argument on facts in the record setting out his status as a parent. There are, however, no such facts anywhere in the extensive record in this case. There is not one word in the record indicating that Mr. Youngman is a father at all. Nor did Mr. Youngman claim such status in his notice of appeal. App. 166.
In fact, the brief for respondent filed in this Court suggests that Mr. Youngman did not have a child in the Williamsport Area High School when he filed his notice of appeal from the District Court’s decision on June 10,1983. Benjamin Young-man, rather, apparently is claimed to have begun studying at that school several months later, in the fall of 1983. Brief for Respondent Youngman 6, and n. 3. Assertions in the parties’ briefs are not part of the record for purposes of determining our jurisdiction. This discrepancy, however, illustrates the wisdom of our long-established rule requiring that the facts supporting our Article III jurisdiction “appea[r] affirmatively from the record.” King Bridge Co. v. Otoe County, 120 U. S. 225, 226 (1887).
Because no facts appear in the record supporting Mr. Youngman’s status as the parent of a child enrolled in the Williamsport Area High School opposed to petitioners’ activities, I join the opinion and judgment of the Court vacating the judgment below and remanding with instructions to dismiss the appeal for want of jurisdiction.