Court Opinion

ID: 9473166
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:21:37.247162+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:21.938752
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Chief Judge,
concurring:
I concur without reservation in what Judge Rubin writes. I add these comments because I regard the dissent’s reliance on McDowell v. Texas as misplaced. 465 F.2d 1342 (5th Cir.1971), aff'd on rehearing en banc, 465 F.2d 1349 (5th Cir.1972), cert. denied, 410 U.S. 943, 93 S.Ct. 1371, 35 L.Ed.2d 610 (1973).
The essential distinction between today’s case and McDowell lies in the nature of the right affected. Dr. McDowell’s claim was based on his dismissal from a non-tenured position as administrator of a Texas institution for retarded children. He asserted that his dismissal resulted from his refusal to violate state law by admitting to his institution a child not entitled to admission. The proof established that Dr. McDowell’s discharge caused him no stigma nor injury to his reputation. Indeed, he immediately received many offers for employment and promptly accepted one at an increase in pay. Thus, we held that no federal constitutional right was asserted in the discharge. The only violation of state law involved merely furnished the occasion for the state to act to terminate his at-will employment. Both Perry v. Sindermann, *435408 U.S. 593, 92 S.Ct. 2694, 33 L.Ed.2d 570 (1972), and Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564, 92 S.Ct. 2701, 33 L.Ed.2d 548 (1972), intervened between the McDowell panel and en banc opinions to furnish confirmation satisfactory to a unanimous court that the property right asserted by Dr. McDowell was not of a nature which was cognizable under the fourteenth amendment.
Dr. Stern’s case is altogether different. The law of the State of Texas expressly requires that his medical degree be accepted as the equivalent of that possessed by an allopathic doctor. But, the John Peter Smith Hospital refuses to accord him the concomitant right to staff privileges which Texas has granted.
This arbitrary state action depriving Dr. Stern of the right to practice his profession in a state hospital deprives him of a property right clearly within the protection of the fourteenth amendment. In Roth, the Supreme Court explained the attributes of “property” interests which come within the ambit of the Federal Constitution in these terms:
To have a property interest in a benefit, a person clearly must have more than an abstract need or desire for it. He must have more than a unilateral expectation of it. He must, instead, have a legitimate claim of entitlement to it. It is a purpose of the ancient institution of property to protect those claims upon which people rely in their daily lives, reliance that must not be arbitrarily un-dermined____
Property interests, of course, are not created by the Constitution. Rather they are created and their dimensions are defined by existing rules or understandings that stem from an independent source such as state law — rules or understanding that secure certain benefits and that support claims of entitlement to those benefits____”
408 U.S. at 577, 92 S.Ct. at 2709.
In Logan v. Zimmerman Brush Co., 455 U.S. 422, 430, 102 S.Ct. 1148, 1155, 71 L.Ed.2d 265 (1982), the Court further stated:
The hallmark of property, the Court has emphasized, is an individual entitlement grounded in state law, which cannot be removed except “for cause.” ... Once that characteristic is found, the types of interests protected as “property” are varied and, as often as not, intangible, relating “to the whole domain of social and economic fact.” (Citations omitted.)
Neither Hayman nor Berman viewed hospital staff privileges as beyond the reach of federal constitutional protection because the nature of staff privileges was unimportant. Rather, the analysis in those cases turned on the rationality of the state’s choice to prefer allopathy over osteopathy. Each found that the state action in distinguishing the two practices bore a rational relationship to a valid state objective. Because this was so, the action denying equal rights to the two schools of medicine implicated no constitutional values. Texas has decided that issue differently. This difference, having been recognized, invests Dr. Stern with an important right to equal treatment with allopathic physicians that cannot be arbitrarily denied by the John Peter Smith Hospital without breaching the fourteenth amendment.