Court Opinion

ID: 9458959
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:06:34.178904+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:35:57.815162
License: Public Domain

JOHN R. BROWN, Chief Judge
(concurring) :
I concur in the result and in much of Judge Clark’s able opinion. I would join also in Judge Wisdom’s concurrence and all of that of Judge Simpson’s save where he embraces completely Judge Tuttle’s concurrence in Sherling v. Townley, 5 Cir., 1972, 464 F.2d 587 which, to me, in a reverse way is subject to the same deficiency as Karr with its per se rule — one for, one against hair restrictions.
I think Judge Clark for the Court has bravely revealed the shortcomings of our vaunted case-and-controversy system with its insatiable demand for record facts. As he wisely points out, when all is said and done, these decisions' do not —and it would be a dangerous thing if they did — turn on the presence or absence of word testimony from administrators, school boards, freedom militants or variations in between as to the consequences in order, discipline, learning environment and the like flowing from the cosmetic factor of hair. For this testimony — pro and con — is freely available with none of the restraints of perjury, and in the last analysis the Judge picks and chooses, not because one is more, or less, creditable than the other, but simply because the one rather than the other comes closest to the Judge’s notion of what the law demands or tolerates.
Indeed, except for one limited dissent in Karr, the position of the majority was not on the factual record. It was on the idea that the state could regulate, with no indicated justification, the length of hair.
This is no apologia for the system. It is a recognition of fact. And for a calling already full of its own myths and the expectation that our Commission somehow invests us with a prescience given to no other men, it is good for us to acknowledge our limitations and the occasional inadequacy of our system to honestly articulate the distinctions in judgment.
My slight difference is that while recognizing these influences leading Judges to decision, it seems a contradiction to cast it in terms of per se. For by sheer numbers, that is to aggregate the individualized judicial hunches into something that, genie-like, is a principle of law. See Hutcheson, The Judgment Intuitive: The Function of the “Hunch” in Judicial Decisions, 1929, 14 Corn.L. Q. 274. Except for this I concur in the opinion and certainly the result.