Court Opinion

ID: 9428417
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:23:45.270454+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:13.345129
License: Public Domain

Justice White,
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion and write separately only to observe that neither Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U. S. 539 (1974), nor Meachum v. Fano, 427 U. S. 215 (1976), suggested that state law is the only source of a prisoner’s liberty worthy of *468federal constitutional protection. The opinion in Wolff v. McDonnell pointed out that although a prisoner’s “rights may be diminished by the needs and exigencies of the institutional environment, [he] is not wholly stripped of constitutional protections when he is imprisoned for crime. . . . [He] may not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” 418 U. S., at 555-556. The issue in the case was the deprivation of the right to good-time credits, a right which was not guaranteed by the Federal Constitution but was a creation of state law. Wolff held that even such a liberty interest rooted in state law was entitled to constitutional protection.
Meachum v. Fano also pointed out that “the convicted felon does not forfeit all constitutional protections by reason of his conviction and confinement in prison. He retains a variety of important rights that the courts must be alert to protect.” 427 U. S., at 225. The Court went on to hold that a state prisoner has no federal constitutional right protecting him against administrative transfers to another state prison. Neither did state law purport to create a liberty interest entitled to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. Of course, Justice Stevens was in dissent in that case; but even there he recognized that the Court’s opinion first addressed whether the right asserted was one of the liberty interests retained by convicted felons. We decided that it was not; he thought that it was. But neither Wolff nor Meachum is fairly characterized as suggesting that all liberty interests entitled to constitutional protection must be found in state law.