Court Opinion

ID: 9420917
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:56:19.442733+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:27.591646
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter.
We held in Textile Mills Securities Corp. v. Commissioner, 314 U. S. 326, construing an ambiguous statute, that courts of appeals consisting of more than three active circuit judges had inherent power to sit en banc. Thereafter Congress placed this power on a statutory basis. 28 U. S. C. § 46(c). Petitioners in this case claim that, in exercising the authority to sit en banc for the rehearing of a cause adjudicated by a three-judge panel, all the active judges of a court of appeals must formally consider the merits of the defeated party’s formal motion for such a rehearing. I agree with the Court in its rejection of this claim. I equally agree that, as an abstract proposition, en banc sitting expresses the court’s power and not the litigant’s right. I agree, finally, that courts of appeals may have general rules, whether formally promulgated or traditionally recognized, concerning the exercise of this discretionary power, and that it is for them and not for us to establish such rules.
No one can feel more strongly than I do that the function of the courts of appeals in the federal judicial system *269requires that their independence, within the area of their authority, be safeguarded. “Certainly this Court should in every possible way attribute to [them] a prestige which invites reliance for the burdens of appellate review except in those cases, relatively few, in which this Court is called upon to adjudicate constitutional issues or other questions of national importance.” Ex parte Peru, 318 U. S. 578, 590, 602 (dissenting opinion). And so what follows is not to be read as suggesting subordination of the discretionary powers of the courts of appeals to our direction.
The language of 28 U. S. C. § 46 (c) and its history do not, I believe, indicate either that Congress expected courts of appeals to sit en banc for the disposition of motions praying that they hear or rehear causes en banc, or that Congress expected they would not do so. The hearings on S. 1053 — the predecessor proposal of § 46 (c), which failed of passage — are equivocal on this point. Remarks, such as Senator McFarland’s, that the courts “would be the ones to do the acting” graze the problem. It was not urged that counsel should do the “acting” in the sense that it would be mandatory to grant a motion for rehearing en banc whenever one was made. There was on the other hand the testimony of Chief Justice Groner of the Court of Appeals of the District, who indicated quite clearly that counsel would be expected to move the courts to sit en banc. Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on S. 1050, S. 1051, S. 1052, S. 1053, S. 1054 and H. R. 138, 77th Cong., 1st Sess., at pp. 17, 40. The view of so experienced and wise a judge carries great weight. In any event, this is the legislative history of a bill which never became law. No legislative light was shed on § 46 (c).
It is right to conclude that Congress left it to the courts of appeals to decide how they would exercise their discretionary power to sit en banc. But it is no less rea*270sonable to conclude that the courts of appeals are to exercise their discretion so as to effectuate the purposes of the legislation. Before I proceed with consideration of the modes by which the power to sit en banc may be brought into play, in light of the ends to be achieved by it, a word about rehearings in general becomes relevant.
Rehearings are not a healthy step in the judicial process; surely they ought not to be deemed a normal procedure. Yet one who has paged the Federal Reporter for nearly fifty years is struck with what appears to be a growth in the tendency to file petitions for rehearing in the courts of appeals. I have not made a quantitative study of the facts, but one gains the impression that in some circuits these petitions are filed almost as a matter of course. This is an abuse of judicial energy. It results in needless delay. It arouses false hopes in defeated litigants and wastes their money. If petitions for rehearing were justified, except in rare instances, it would bespeak serious defects in the work of the courts of appeals, an assumption which must be rejected. It is important to bear this in mind in approaching 28 U. S. C. § 46 (c). That section is directed at those relatively few instances which call for rehearings, though again rarely, in the nine courts of appeals that sit in panels.
Rehearings en banc by these courts, which sit in panels, are to some extent necessary in order to resolve conflicts between panels. This is the dominant concern. Moreover, the most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them. Hence, insofar as possible, determinations en banc are indicated whenever it seems likely that a majority of all the active judges would reach a different result than the panel assigned to hear a case or which has heard it. Hearings en banc may be a resort also in cases extraordinary in scale — either because the amount in*271volved is stupendous or because the issues are intricate enough to invoke the pooled wisdom of the circuit. Any procedure devised by a court of appeals which is sensibly calculated to achieve these dominant ends of avoiding or resolving intra-circuit conflicts may be adopted agreeably with § 46 (c). A rule providing that petitions for rehearing en banc may be made to, and will be considered by, the court en banc would, of course, be so calculated. And, to repeat, that being so, it is not for us to pass on the advantages or disadvantages of such a rule, though one may think, as I do, that it is likely to impose an undue burden by unwittingly encouraging the lax inclination of counsel to file pro forma petitions automatically in every case.
The ends of § 46 (c) may be served in other ways than by permitting petitions for rehearing en banc. A court may decide that it will act under § 46 (c) only sua sponte and will do so whenever the need is made evident, not by wasteful use of judicial resources through excessive preliminary consideration en banc to determine whether or not the need exists, but by the process of having each panel circulate its opinions, before they are emitted, to all the active members of the court. This, it appears, was the practice of the Court of Appeals of the District under Chief Justice Groner. See Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, supra, at p. 39. It accomplishes what is essential to the achievement of the purposes for which the power to sit en banc exists, since it acquaints all active judges on the court “with the proposed opinion that is coming down, so if they do have an opportunity to point out any conflict, or something of the kind, it may be done . . . .” Ibid, (testimony of Groner, C. J.). To be sure, the non-sitting judges have not heard the argument nor read the *272briefs, and have no vote as far as the opinion of the panel is concerned. Presumably, however, an opinion states the issues and gives the grounds for its conclusion and thereby sufficiently alerts the minds of experienced judges to what is at stake. It taps their knowledge of legal considerations that may lead, on the initiative of a non-sitting or of a sitting judge, to a determination by the entire court of whether or not a rehearing en banc is called for.
There may be — there doubtless are — other ways in which a court of appeals, acting sua sponte, may accomplish all that needs to be accomplished in the exercise of the discretionary power to sit en banc. But I do not see how any procedure can do so whose effect is not to apprise all active judges either of all decisions of panels of the court, or of those decisions which counsel bring to the court’s attention, by motion or suggestion — the nomenclature is immaterial — as raising the problems at which the grant of power in § 46 (c) is directed. For this reason I do not believe that a delegation of authority to the panel which heard the case to dispose finally, in behalf of the entire court, of petitions for rehearing en banc — if there are to be such petitions and if through them alone § 46 (c) is to be implemented — would constitute adoption of a permissible procedure for the exercise of the power conferred by § 46 (c). It may be proper to require petitions for rehearing en banc to be made to the panel in the first instance, but to allow the discretionary function under § 46 (c) to be discharged definitively by the panel whose judgment may call for en banc action is to treat the statute as an empty, purposeless form of words.
Since it does not appear in this case that the Court of Appeals, as a whole, at any time exercised its discretion under 28 U. S. C. § 46 (c) by considering the petition for a rehearing en banc on its merits, and since it does not appear that that court has established, and followed in this case, any other procedure for the exercise of its statu*273tory power in a manner consistent with the reasons for its grant, I concur in the judgment of the Court vacating the order below and remanding the cause.