Court Opinion

ID: 9431952
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:33:40.53762+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:31.170347
License: Public Domain

Justice Stevens,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
Because I believe the Court has made this case unnecessarily difficult by exaggerating the importance of finding a precise common-law analogue to the duty of fair representation, I do not join Part III-A of its opinion. Ironically, by stressing the importance of identifying an exact analogue, the Court has diminished the utility of looking for any analogue.
*582As I have suggested in the past, I believe the duty of fair representation action resembles a common-law action against an attorney for malpractice more closely than it does any other form of action. See United Parcel Service, Inc. v. Mitchell, 451 U. S. 56, 74 (1981) (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part). Of course, this action is not an exact counterpart to a malpractice suit. Indeed, by definition, no recently recognized form of action — whether the product of express congressional enactment or of judicial interpretation — can have a precise analog in 17th- or 18th-century English law. Were it otherwise the form of action would not in fact be “recently recognized.”
But the Court surely overstates this action’s similarity to an action against a trustee. Collective bargaining involves no settlor, no trust corpus, and no trust instrument executed to convey property to beneficiaries chosen at the settlor’s pleasure. Nor are these distinctions reified matters of pure form. The law of trusts originated to expand the varieties of land ownership in feudal England, and evolved to protect the paternalistic beneficence of the wealthy, often between generations and always over time. See 1 W. Fratcher, Scott on Trusts § 1 (4th ed. 1987); L. Friedman, A History of American Law 212, 222-223 (1973). Beneficiaries are protected from their own judgment.1 The attorney-client relationship, by contrast, advances the client’s interests in dealings with adverse parties. Clients are saved from their lack of skill, but their judgment is honored. Union members, as a group, accordingly have the power to hire, fire, and direct the actions of their representatives — prerogatives anathema to the paternalistic forms of the equitable trust.2
*583Equitable reasoning calibrated by the sophisticated judgment of the jurist, the accountant, and the chancellor is thus appropriately invoked when the impact of a trustee’s conduct on the future interests of contingent remaindermen must be reviewed. Howevér, the commonsense understanding of the jury, selected to represent the community, is appropriately invoked when disputes in the factory, the warehouse, and the garage must be resolved. In most duty of fair representation cases, the issues, which require an understanding of the realities of employment relationships, are typical grist for the jury’s judgment. Indeed, the law defining the union’s duty of fair representation has developed in cases tried to juries. Thus, Vaca v. Sipes, 386 U. S. 171 (1967), was itself a jury trial as were, for example, Electrical Workers v. Foust, 442 U. S. 42 (1979), and Bowen v. United States Postal Service, 459 U. S. 212 (1983).
As the Court correctly observed in Curtis v. Loether, 415 U. S. 189, 195 (1974), “in an ordinary civil action in the district courts, where there is obviously no functional justification for denying the jury trial right, a jury trial must be available if the action involves rights and remedies of the sort typically enforced in an action at law.” As I had occasion to remark at an earlier proceeding in the same case, the relevant historical question is not whether a suit was “specifically recognized at common law,” but whether “the nature of the substantive right asserted ... is analogous to common law rights” and whether the relief sought is “typical of an action at law.” Rogers v. Loether, 467 F. 2d 1110, 1116-1117 (CA7 1972). Duty of fair representation suits are for the most part ordinary civil actions involving the stuff of contract and malpractice disputes. There is accordingly no ground for excluding these actions from the jury right.
In my view, the evolution of this doctrine through suits tried to juries, the useful analogy to common-law malpractice *584cases, and the well-recognized duty to scrutinize any proposed curtailment of the right to a jury trial “with the utmost care,” ante, at 565, provide a plainly sufficient basis for the Court’s holding today. I therefore join its judgment and all of its opinion except for Part III-A.

 “The duties of the trustee are such as the creator of the trust may choose to impose; the interests of the beneficiaries are such as he may choose to confer upon them.” 1 Fratcher, Scott on Trusts § 1, p. 2.

 Indeed, to make sense of the trust analogy, the majority must apparently be willing to assume that the union members, considered collectively, are both beneficiary and settlor, and that the settlor retains considerable *583power over the corpus, including the power to revoke the trust. That is an odd sort of trust.