Court Opinion

ID: 9484045
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:39:04.147615+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:59.175385
License: Public Domain

BOYCE F. MARTIN, Jr., Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur with the judgment of the court and with most of the court’s opinion. I cannot agree, however, with the majority’s legal analysis of substantive due process.
In part Cl of the opinion, the majority writes, “Substantive due process would require only that the defendants show that its scheme is rationally related to the asserted legitimate governmental purpose of maintaining a financially stable municipal entity.” Supra at 1477 (citing DiMassimo, 805 F.2d at 1541). In my opinion, this test is erroneous because it merely examines whether the governmental scheme fulfills a legitimate governmental purpose and does not examine, as required by Curto v. City of Harper Woods, 954 F.2d 1237, 1243 (6th Cir.1992), whether the governmental scheme fulfills a legitimate governmental purpose by an illegitimate means. Therefore, to guarantee that impermissible means are not used to achieve legitimate ends, I believe that the proper test for deciding whether a statute or regulation violates the substantive component of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is simply whether the regulation is reasonable. As the court noted in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, — U.S. -, -, 112 S.Ct. 2791, 2806, 120 L.Ed.2d 674, 697 (1992), “[Adjudication of substantive due process claims may call upon the Court in interpreting the Constitution to exercise that same capacity which by tradition courts always have exercised: reasoned judgment.” Although Planned Parenthood involved a privacy concern and this case involves an economic regulation, we were first charged with examining eeo-nomic regulations under the Due Process Clause by determining whether they are reasonable. See West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, et al., 300 U.S. 379, 391, 57 S.Ct. 578, 581, 81 L.Ed. 703 (1937) (“Liberty under the Constitution is thus necessarily subject to the restraints of due process, and [a] regulation which is reasonable in relation to its subject and is adopted in the interests of the community is due process.”) (italics added). Between West Coast Hotel Co. and Planned Parenthood, however, the court appeared to back away from a simple test of reasonableness. See, e.g., Williamson v. Lee Optical of Okla., Inc., 348 U.S. 483, 75 S.Ct. 461, 99 L.Ed. 563 (1955) (“The day is gone when this Court uses the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state laws, regulatory of business and industrial conditions, because they may be unwise, improvident, or out of harmony with a particular school of thought.”).
I certainly understand the court’s fear, evidenced in Williamson and numerous other cases, that federal courts may attempt to act as a superlegislature through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, I believe that Planned Parenthood, which admits that courts are necessarily only bound by their best judgment when evaluating substantive due process, applies equally to economic regulations as well as other types of regulations. For that reason, I believe that the court’s decision in Planned Parenthood requires that we return to a test of reasonableness for all substantive-due-process claims. In determining the reasonableness of a regulatory statute, we must certainly be mindful not to simply replace our judgment for the judgment of the legislature, but we cannot abrogate our duty to use a consistent standard in determining whether a particular statute violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Regarding the regulation in this case, I agree with the majority that this regulation *1480is reasonable for the reasons stated by the majority on page 1478.