Court Opinion

ID: 9658184
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 20:50:18.477275+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:52.596307
License: Public Domain

POLLACK, District Judge
(dissenting):
This is a suit seeking declaratory judgment that New York (SSL) §§ 383(2) and 400 and Title 18, New York Codes, Rules, and Regulations (N.Y.C.R.R.) § 450.14 are unconstitutional on their face and as applied and seeking injunctive relief against their enforcement. The complaint is grounded on allegations that the sections, which prescribe procedures for the separation of foster children from their foster parents, deprive plaintiffs of due process and equal protection in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. For the reasons shown hereafter the complaint must be dismissed.
The present statutory scheme, applicable throughout most of the state, provides that the local Public Welfare Department or any authorized private agency acting on its behalf may, at any time up to two years after a child has been placed in foster care, in its discretion and on ten days’ written notice, order the removal of any foster child from the foster home in which he or she has been placed. SSL §§ 383(2), (3), 400 (1976 Supp.). Following notice of the impending removal, the foster parents may request a conference with a social services official and are given the reasons for removal and have an opportunity to express their views thereon. The child may not be removed from the foster home until three days after the conference. Written notice of the decision must be sent to the foster parents no later than five days after the conference which must contain advice of their right to appeal to the Department. N.Y.C.R.R. § 450.14(a-e). A decision to remove may be appealed to the Department, by “any person aggrieved”, and the Department must review the case, give the appellant an opportunity for a fair hearing and render a decision within thirty days. SSL § 400(2) (1976 Supp.). A foster parent has been held to be an “aggrieved person” and where administrative remedies are finally exhausted, Court review is available by way of an Article 78 proceeding, CPLR 7801 et seq., before the New York Supreme Court. In re W, 77 Misc.2d 374, 355 N.Y.S.2d 245 *287(Family Ct.N.Y.Co.1974). Additionally, after 24 months of foster parentage the foster parents are granted the statutory right to “intervene” in any proceeding involving the custody of the child. SSL § 383(3) (1976 Supp.). Habeas corpus review is also presumably available at the instance of either the foster parent or the foster child. N.Y. CPLR §§ 7001 et seq.1
The foster-parent-plaintiffs contend that these procedures deprive them of “liberty and property” interests without due process of law. The specific liberty interest which they assert is the right to familial privacy.
Plaintiffs insist that after one year of foster care, no child should be removed from a foster home without prior notice and an adversary hearing because emotional attachments have formed by that time which the state should not be at liberty arbitrarily to upset.
Plaintiffs-foster-parents initially sought to represent, as “next friend,” the interests of their foster children as well. However, to forestall any possible conflict of interest, Judge Carter appointed Helen L. Butten-wieser as independent counsel for the foster children. In that capacity she has consistently argued that the foster parents have no constitutionally cognizable interest independent of those of the foster children and that an adversary hearing is not the proper forum to determine the “best interest of the child.”
The plaintiffs-foster-parents, in attempting in this action to obtain rights to certain procedures before a child may be removed from their home, no matter what the circumstances of the foster parents’ home, are in effect seeking legislative relief.
Since the commencement of this law suit, New York City has revised its removal procedures when the child is to be placed somewhere other than with its own parents. These new procedures grant to foster parents most of the procedural protections requested by plaintiffs in this law suit: a foster parent receives detailed notice of the intent to remove a child, the reasons for the intended removal, and the right to a fair hearing by the City’s Department of Social Services. The foster parents have access to Agency reports to be used at the hearing. Foster parents can present and cross-examine witnesses. The Agency determination must be based only on the record; its written decision must be served within five days of the hearing; and the child cannot be moved in the interim. A recording of the hearing is made and is available at cost.
All members of the Court agree that there is no merit in plaintiffs’ argument that the realities of the foster care system, as presently administered in New York State, justify the finding of an expectation akin to a “property interest” that their role as foster parents will not be abruptly and summarily terminated. See Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564, 92 S.Ct. 2701, 33 L.Ed.2d 548 (1972). Each foster parent signed, upon assuming responsibility for his or her respective foster child, a contract which reserves to the Agency the right to recall the child “upon request, realizing that such request will only be made for good reason.”2
Moreover, plaintiffs’ assertion that the foster home is entitled to the same constitutional deference as that long granted to the more traditional biological family because recent studies conclude that the “family” *288can best be conceived as a psychological entity, presents a novel question and an interesting social debate. The plaintiffs seemingly ask this Court to extend to them the due process protection afforded to the biological father of an illegitimate child in Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645, 92 S.Ct. 1208, 31 L.Ed.2d 551 (1972). Such an extension would adopt a principle that has long been anathema to the State’s foster care policies. The psychological parent/child relationship is an amorphus one, not something that can be precisely defined or explained. The New York Courts have virtually unanimously refused the notion of “common law adoption” and have stated that, in absence of a statutory scheme, adoption — that is the means whereby the status or relationship of parent or child is created between persons not so related by nature — is not permitted. Matter of Malpica-Orsini, 36 N.Y.2d 568, 570, 370 N.Y.S.2d 511, 331 N.E.2d 486 (1975); Landon v. Motorola, Inc., 38 A.D.2d 18, 326 N.Y.S.2d 960 (3d Dept. 1971).3
Having decided that the foster parents have no entitlement to their foster children, the Court declines to decide the debate surrounding the plaintiffs’ requested extension of Stanley v. Illinois, supra; an extension which would invest plaintiffs with a “liberty” interest either in the children or the relationship itself. Instead of entering that debate, the Court departs from the better part of plaintiffs’ claims, focused as they are on allegations of unconstitutionality from the viewpoint of the foster parents. The Court then rests its decision on a characterization of the foster children’s interest that has been denied by the children’s representative, Mrs. Buttenwieser. The Court’s opinion anticipates a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it. It holds over the objection of the representative of the children in this suit that the foster children have a “liberty” interest in their relationship with the foster parents. The position of the children taken by the Court is espoused only by the foster parents who have no standing to assert the children’s interest.4 No one *289with standing to claim that the children require the due process protection sought herein is making that claim and, therefore, on well-settled principle it is not necessary or appropriate to reach that issue.
“The Court will not ‘anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it.’ Liverpool, N. Y. & P.S.S. Co. v. Emigration Commissioners, 113 U.S. 33, 39; 5 S.Ct. 352, 355, 28 L.Ed. 899; Abrams v. Van Schaick, 293 U.S. 188; 55 S.Ct. 135, 79 L.Ed. 278; Wilshire Oil Co. v. United States, 295 U.S. 100. 55 S.Ct. 673, 79 L.Ed. 1329. ‘It is not the habit of the court to decide questions of a constitutional nature unless absolutely necessary to the decision of the case.’ Burton v. United States, 196 U.S. 283, 295.” 25 S.Ct. 243, 245, 49 L.Ed. 482. Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 297 U.S. 288, 346-7, 56 S.Ct. 466, 483, 80 L.Ed. 688 (1936) (Brandéis, J., concurring).5
On the basis of its resolution of this anticipated question the Court decides that the preremoval procedures presently employed by the State are constitutionally defective in that a child is entitled to a hearing “whenever and as soon as the child has been placed in a foster home for long term care or whenever, for any reason, he has remained in a foster home for a period of one year or more.” Pursuing this result, which has every earmark of legislative action, the Court rules that “defendants are enjoined from removing any foster children from the foster homes in which they have been placed for long term care or in which they have lived for more than one year unless and until they grant a preremoval hearing.” *
Realizing that it is moving into un-chartered seas, the Court states “we are reluctant to impose any pre-ordained structure upon the endeavor of trained social workers to evaluate the often ambiguous indices of a child’s emotional attachments and psychological development. Rather, we believe the sounder course is to allow the various defendants — state and local officials — the first opportunity to formulate procedures suitable to their own professional needs and compatible with the principles set forth in this opinion.”
This result will undoubtedly come as a surprise, if not a shock, to the parties. No one has contended for the view reached in the Court’s opinion, except possibly to touch on the subject matter tangentially. The parties should certainly have been given a hearing (a briefing opportunity) on the point made by the opinion. They should have been alerted to the possibility that the Court might undertake to consider the “unconstitutionality” of the present procedures from the viewpoint of the foster children, whose representative was not asserting any such contention.
If the Court must reach the interest of the children, it must face a situation in which at every step in the foster care system (whether before or after the 24 month period) the child is represented only by the State or by the foster parents. He receives no notice and has no independent representative at any stage; in short, he has no independent role. Therefore, if the question were properly presented, the Court would have to decide whether or not the State, in its parens patriae capacity, acts as a sufficient representative for the child and whether or not the Due Process Clause *290mandates as adversarial hearing for foster children.
Since an independent representative for the child will inevitably be required, the Court has imposed on the delicate system of foster care an inapposite model for the application of the Due Process Clause; a model which requires the balancing of the individual’s apparent need for procedural safeguards and the State’s apparent need for summary action.6
The very structure of the State’s foster care system belies the applicability of this model. In a system that at least purports (and the evidence herein shows that it actually does) represent “the best interests of the child” there can be no such facile distinction between the interest of the child, on the one hand, and that of the State, on the other. Unlike the traditional context in which the Due Process Clause has been litigated, there is no necessary opposition between the child and the State here. The State’s professional social workers should not so easily be rejected as adequate representatives for foster children (if in this context the Due Process Clause requires strict “representation” at all). Their representation of those children has simply not, on the hearing of this case, been shown to be so inadequate as to require the introduction of a third party to represent the child.
The interests involved in this system of child care are too sensitive, too inchoate, to fit this old due process model; and there seems little doubt that this case presents a striking example of the need for flexibility in the application of the Due Process Clause.7 Neither the Court’s adherence to the old Due Process approach by requiring an independent representative, nor its refusal to provide further guidelines for the type of hearing it envisions, taps the potential for such flexibility.
If the Court has, in fact, improperly required a third party to represent the child, then the remainder of its analysis can only be described as legislation. In holding that the child’s interest requires that the foster parents have a formal voice in any decision to remove the child after a year of foster parentage or whenever the child is placed with them for “long term care,” the Court first undertakes to express a social policy preference for a one year rather than the present statutory two year period, and then hedges by promulgating a vague standard (as yet undefined in this system) apparently meant to test foster parent-child relationships from their incipieney. There is no support for such a use of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Rather than relying on the disinterested social judgment of professional social workers acting under the aegis of well-conceived tried and tested statutes, the Court’s'decision embroils the child in legalistic, psychological theorism; leaving the child a pawn in a game from which the child should be spared. No evidence has shown that the present procedures are conducive to or have resulted in hasty or ill-advised separations from the viewpoint of the foster child.
*291The right of cross-examination and discovery procedures, which would presumably now be afforded to foster parents after one year, have not been shown to be in the best interests of the child.
I do not imply in any wise that a child should not have the right to be heard — to participate. That is not what is at stake. The only question before the Court is whether layers of procedural obstruction should be afforded to the foster parents to impede judgments reasonably reached by concerned independent disinterested agencies and professionals by less starchy methods. The preremoval conference and the procedures leading thereto are not in any instance shown to have been defective from the viewpoint of the foster child. It is unrealistic to expect that a pre-teenage child, for example, is to invoke the “hearing” contemplated by the majority decision. And if an appointed adult representative is needed to articulate the interest of the child — the existing procedures accord the needed due process.
The State legislature which spawned the statutory scheme that makes the foster parent-child relationship possible has made the rational decision that until it is 24 months old this relationship can never be sufficiently strong to require pre-termination hearing protection. While the Court should not abdicate its constitutional responsibilities or improperly defer to a state legislature, the Court should not overturn the legislature’s decision absent adequate proof that it is irrational or unfair. In short, it can recognize the State legislature’s superior fact-finding ability and it can agree with that legislature’s decision without avoiding its obligation to determine what does and does not satisfy the Due Process Clause.
The Supreme Court has warned against a return to the days of substantive due process.
Under the system of government created by our Constitution, it is up to legislatures, not courts, to decide on the wisdom and utility of legislation. There was a time when the Due Process Clause was used by this Court to strike down laws which were thought unreasonable, that is, unwise or incompatible with some particular economic or social philosophy. . . . We have returned to the original constitutional proposition that courts do not substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgment of legislative bodies, who are elected to pass laws. . . . We refuse to sit as a “superlegislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation,” and we emphatically refuse to go back to the time when courts used the Due Process Clause “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.” .... The . statute may be wise or unwise. But relief, if any be needed, lies not with us but with the body constituted to pass laws for the State .... Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 U.S. 726, 729-732, 83 S.Ct. 1028, 1030, 10 L.Ed.2d 93 (1963).
This warning applies equally well to the social as to the economic sphere. While (in the first two years of foster parentage) it may conceivably be wiser to hold a pre-ter-mination hearing to hear the parties out, it is not, thereby, constitutionally required. The evidence has not shown that, during those first two years, the foster parents and the foster child are not afforded adequate due process. The choice of providing a pre-termination hearing after one year of foster parentage rather than the two year period now embodied in SSL § 383(3) through the right of intervention, is a choice that seems particularly legislative in character.
I would dismiss the complaint.

. The statutes outlined above and under attack here also fairly put the foster parents on notice of the State’s right to summarily remove the child from the foster home within 24 months of foster parentage. Of course, the observations in the text above are principally relevant with respect to an assertion of an “entitlement” to the children or the foster parent-child relationship. Such a property-like interest is to be distinguished from an assertion of a “liberty” interest similar to that asserted in Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645, 92 S.Ct. 1208, 31 L.Ed.2d 551 (1972).

. The Appellate Division of the Second Department has recently refused to reverse a Trial Term decision ordering two of the plaintiffs in this action to return their foster children to their natural mother. State ex rel. Wallace v. Lhotan, 51 A.D.2d 252, 380 N.Y.S.2d 250 (2d Dept., 1976). In that decision the Court discussed part of the rationale behind the rejection of the concept of common-law adoption in the case of foster parents.
. the foster parents must make a serious attempt to encourage, not discourage, the improvement of relations between the children under their charge and a mother who is trying to reestablish the bonds of family love and concern. A portion of the love that foster parents have for the children must be directed towards easing their return to their natural parent. Whatever circumstances will rend the family fabric, it should not be the result of actions of the foster parents, who have taken on their delicate responsibilities on the solemn promise to do otherwise.
So it is that foster parents are charged with the duty to avoid forming the very psychological relationship which they present here as a justification for a pre-removal hearing.

. The Supreme Court has frequently expressed the general rule that one person does not have standing to assert the constitutional rights of another. United (States v. Raines, 362 U.S. 17, 21-22, 80 S.Ct. 519, 4 L.Ed.2d 524 (1960); Tile-ston v. Ullman, 318 U.S. 44, 46, 63 S.Ct. 493, 87 L.Ed. 603 (1943). See generally, Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 443-46, 92 S.Ct. 1029, 31 L.Ed.2d 349 (1972); Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U.S. 249, 73 S.Ct. 1031, 97 L.Ed. 1586 (1953). In light of the representation of the children by Mrs. Buttenweiser and the Court’s holding that an independent representative is required for the foster child at the due process hearing it orders, there can be no grounds for waiving this general rule in this case.
By its appointment of Mrs. Buttenweiser the Court has recognized the severability of the claims of foster parents and the foster children. See Rule 17(c), Fed.R.Civ.P.; 6 Wright and Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 1570, at 774 (1971). Therefore the foster parents cannot now be invested with standing as an exception to the Raines rule on the ground that their interests are not severable from those of the children. See Sedler, Standing to Assert Constitutional Jus Tertii in the Supreme Court, 7T Yale L.J. 599, 606 et seq. (1962); Note, Standing to Assert Constitutional Jus Tertii, 88 Harv.L.Rev. 423 (1974).
The Court’s recognition of some interest in the children other than that asserted by their independent representative herein betrays a significant confusion over the question of when a child does and does not require independent representation under the Due Process Clause. Apparently a child requires an independent representative in the hearing required by the *289Court despite the views of the children’s independent representative in the hearing of this action. In short, allowing foster parents standing here to assert the interest of the children seriously undermines the Court’s later finding that the children require representation independent of the foster parents at a due process hearing.

. This principle of constitutional jurisprudence is precisely the authority invoked by the Court in its avoidance of the debate surrounding plaintiffs’ analogy to Stanley v. Illinois, supra. See generally Rescue Army v. Municipal Court, 331 U.S. 549, 568-75, 67 S.Ct. 1409, 91 L.Ed. 1666 (1947).

 The Court’s draft opinion was as quoted above. It has since limited its holding to apply to only those foster children who have resided with one set of foster parents for at least a year. The dissent is nonetheless the same.

. See Bell v. Burson, 402 U.S. 535, 91 S.Ct. 1586, 29 L.Ed.2d 90 (1971); Richardson v. Perales, 402 U.S. 389, 91 S.Ct. 1420, 28 L.Ed.2d 842 (1971); Note, Specifying the Procedures Required By Due Process: Toward Limits on the Use of Interest Balancing, 88 Harv.L.Rev. 1510 (1975).

. “The very nature of due process negates any concept of inflexible procedures universally applicable to every imaginable situation. . what procedures due process may require under any given set of circumstances must begin with a determination of the precise nature of the government function involved as well as of the private interest that has been affected by governmental action. . . . ‘ “[D]ue process,” unlike some legal rules, is not a technical conception with a fixed content unrelated to time, place and circumstances.’ It is ‘compounded of history, reason, the past course of decisions . . . .’ Joint Anti-Fascist Comm. v. McGrath, 341 U.S. 123, 162-163 [71 S.Ct. 624, 643, 95 L.Ed. 817] (concurring opinion).” Cafeteria & Restaurant Workers, Local 473 v. McElroy, 367 U.S. 886, 895, 81 S.Ct. 1743, 1748, 6 L.Ed.2d 1230 (1961). See also, Frost v. Weinberger, 515 F.2d 57, 66 (2d Cir. 1975); Friendly, H. J., “Some Kind of Hearing”, 123 U.Pa.L.Rev. 1267 (1975); Frankel, M., The Search for Truth: An Umpireal View, 123 U.Pa.L.Rev. 1031, 1036 (1975).