Court Opinion

ID: 9470618
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:11:16.858151+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:56.981745
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
A school board has a squabble with its football coach and fires him, though his (implied) contract has a year to run. This court holds that the board’s action violates section 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, because: the Fourteenth Amendment forbids the state, of which the school board is an arm, to deprive anyone of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; a contract right is a species of property and was taken away here without a hearing; therefore the state acted unconstitutionally. If this logic is applied unflinchingly, any time a school board or any other local government body breaks a contract without first holding a hearing, the contractor — who need not be an employee, who could be a supplier of paper clips — can get damages in federal court. I am slightly comforted by the realization that the life of the law has not been logic and by the suggestion in Judge Wood’s opinion that “other matter[s] of state business” may be treated differently from employment contracts. I would be more comforted if the opinion gave a reason for distinguishing the supply of goods from the supply of personal services, which it does not, and if it omitted the dictum that in the employment area no contract, express or implied, is needed to create a constitutionally protected property right.
But even if the decision in this case can be confined to employment contracts — even if it can be confined to cases where the employee is fired — it goes too far. There is no federal interest in this case, unless the Fourteenth Amendment is thought to invest with federal significance all state action, however unthreatening to the rights *1450we deem fundamental. Vail was not fired because he exercised his freedom of speech or some other liberty protected by the Constitution, or because of his race (in which event he would have a claim under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment), or for any other reason in which the federal courts as tribunals for enforcing the Constitution — viewed as a charter of liberty rather than an invitation to the federal courts to bring the whole business of the states under their wing— have an interest. The only federal question in this case is whether breaches of public employment contracts are constitutional torts litigable in federal court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Once that threshold is crossed, all that is left to be discussed — all the court does discuss — is whether the school board broke its contract with Vail under Illinois law. If ever a decision gratuitously displaced state by federal jurisdiction, it is this decision.
I do not submit with as good a grace as my brethren to the tyranny of the syllogism. We can break the chain of reasoning at any of three links. We can hold that the interest created by a contract between a school board and a nonacademic employee for a short fixed term is not “property” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment; that a simple breach of contract does not “deprive” the employee of his right; or that there was no denial of due process of law.
Although the word “property” was broadly understood in the eighteenth century— Madison wrote in 1792 that it “embraces everything to which a man may attach a value and have a right,” Essay on Property, in 6 Madison, Writings 101 (Hunt ed. 1906) —the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment used the word in a narrower sense and assigned its broader connotations to “life” and “liberty.” Madison wrote that a man “has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person. He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.” Id. Madison would not have regarded a simple breach of contract as a deprivation of property in the exalted sense in which he was using the term and he could not have thought it a deprivation of property in the narrower lawyer’s sense, since in the eighteenth century, as today, contract rights and property rights were distinct. See 2 Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 442-70 (1766); 3 id. at 153-66 (1768). The Constitution distinguishes them explicitly, as one can see by comparing the contracts clause in Article I, section 10, with the due process and just compensation clauses of the Fifth Amendment. And if property means the same thing in the due process and just compensation clauses, a contract right cannot possibly be a property right, because the government does not have to pay just compensation for breaking a contract.
Until the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted there were few decisions interpreting the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, and none dealt with the status of a mere contract right. There is no basis for thinking that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, in applying the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment verbatim to state action, wanted to give “property” a brand new meaning. Of course many Fourteenth Amendment due process cases have involved “liberty of contract,” but that is a different animal from specific contract rights. If the State of Illinois forbade Mr. Vail to work as a football coach it would be interfering with his liberty of contract, cf. Allgeyer v. Louisiana, 165 U.S. 578, 591, 17 S.Ct. 427, 432, 41 L.Ed. 832 (1897) — that is, with property in the Madi-sonian sense — but that is not what it did, which is why cases like Allgeyer and like Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong, 426 U.S. 88, 102, 96 S.Ct. 1895, 1904, 48 L.Ed.2d 495 (1976), are irrelevant. Not even in the palmiest days of liberty of contract was it thought that a state infringed that liberty by breaking a contract with one of its employees or suppliers. See Hartigan v. Board of Regents, 49 W.Va. 14, 38 S.E. 698 (1901). The spirit of those times is well captured by *1451a statement made by the Supreme Court of Tennessee in reference to the most famous public school teacher in American history: “in dealing with its own employees engaged upon its own work, the state is not hampered by the limitations of . .. the Fourteenth Amendment to the. Constitution of the United States.” Scopes v. State, 154 Tenn. 105, 112, 289 S.W. 363, 365 (1927).
Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U.S. 593, 599, 601-02, 92 S.Ct. 2694, 2699-2700, 33 L.Ed.2d 570 (1972), is often thought to have raised a contract right to the level of a constitutional property right. Its companion case, Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564, 577-78, 92 S.Ct. 2701, 2709-10, 33 L.Ed.2d 548 (1972), held that if a state college teacher had no right under state law to continued employment he had no property right under the due process clause. But Sindermann alleged that he had an implicit right to tenure under state law, and the Court remanded the case for a trial of that allegation.
No doubt the Court believed that if Sin-dermann had tenure under state law he could not be discharged without due process of law, though this was assumed rather than argued. But the Court did not thereby equate contract rights with property rights having their source in contracts. Sindermann “alleged that [his interest in continued employment at Odessa Junior College], though not secured by a formal contractual tenure provision, was secured by a no less binding understanding fostered by the college administration. In particular, [he] alleged that the college had a de facto tenure program, and that he had tenure under that program.” 408 U.S. at 599-600, 92 S.Ct. at 2698-2699 (emphasis added). The important thing was not that a contract was alleged to have been broken but that tenure — arguably a form of property, a form having its source, as much property has its source, in contract — was alleged to have been destroyed.
A contract that gives a teacher the right to be employed till he retires is special, for unless he is old or rich the present value of his tenure right is probably his biggest asset. The Supreme Court, in dealing with recipients of welfare benefits, had held before Sindermann that statutory entitlements of indefinite duration have enough attributes of conventional property to be protected by the due process clause. See, e.g., Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254, 261-62, 90 S.Ct. 1011, 1016-17, 25 L.Ed.2d 287 (1970). Sindermann and the welfare cases extend to individuals who lack substantial assets of a conventional sort the protection of the due process clause for the unconventional assets they have.
The present case involves a two-year implied contract that when terminated had only one year to run. It is true that the difference between term and tenure contracts is one of degree and that if a teacher had only one year to go to retirement his stake in his tenure contract would be no, greater than Vail’s. But this is only to say that some contract rights are worth more than some property rights; it does not eliminate the distinction between tenure as property and a mere contract right. It is also true that Hostrop v. Board of Junior College Dist. No. 515, 471 F.2d 488, 494 (7th Cir.1972), extended Sindermann to term employment contracts. But it did so uncritically, without discussion of the distinction I have just noted; and since, like Roth and Sindermann, it involved a teacher rather than an athletic coach, it is distinguishable from the present case by reference to a long history of judicial solicitude for the interests of teachers — especially college teachers, the plaintiffs in Roth, Sindermann, and Hostrop.
Daniel Webster argued to the Supreme Court in the Dartmouth College case that “professors have freeholds in their offices; subject only to be removed, by the trustees ... for good cause .... No description of' private property has been regarded as more sacred than college livings. They are the estates and freehold of a most deserving class of men .... ” Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 518, 583-84, 4 L.Ed. 629 (1819). See also Hartigan v. Board of Regents, supra, 49 W.Va. at 30-60, 38 S.E. at 709-18 (dissent*1452ing opinion). The'idea that teachers have a special claim to judicial protection now goes by the name of academic freedom, “a concept fashioned from other constitutional rights, including the First Amendment and due process rights of faculty to avoid censure for the views they teach and espouse.” Gray v. Board of Higher Educ., City of N.Y., 692 F.2d 901, 909 (2d Cir.1982); see also cases cited at id., n. 14; Martin v. Helstad, 699 F.2d 387, 391 (7th Cir.1983); id. at 392-99 (concurring opinion). Most cases (again including Roth, Sindermann, and Hostrop) in which teachers have mounted constitutional challenges to their dismissal have involved alleged deprivations of freedom of speech — one of the liberties protected by the due process clause — as well as of a property right in continued employment. Although the Supreme Court in Roth and Sindermann, and a panel of this circuit in Hostrop, treated these as distinct rights, this may have been — though I admit I am speculating — because protection against arbitrary dismissal was thought necessary to prevent infringements of freedom of academic speech that would be too difficult to prove. The dismissal of a football coach does not endanger academic freedom.
The First Circuit’s recent decision in Casey v. DePetrillo, 697 F.2d 22 (1st Cir.1983) (per curiam), which upheld the dismissal of a public school employees’ section 1983 suit against local school officials, shows the difference between this case and Hostrop. The suit alleged that “the defendants injured [the plaintiffs] by breaching the plaintiffs’ employment contracts,” id. at 23, and was thus, “at bottom, a simple action for breach of contract for which the state provides a complete and adequate remedy” and which therefore “failed to state a claim for relief under federal law,” id. There is no indication that the plaintiffs were academic employees with tenure — but Mr. Vail is not an academic employee with tenure either.
But if Hostrop is indistinguishable from the present case, then let us overrule Hos-trop, a decision of this court, not of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has never equated tenure with nontenure contracts; and we are not obliged to read Supreme Court decisions broadly in order to reach foolish results. I plead guilty, though, to Judge Eschbach’s charge that I am “superimposing a unifying doctrinal thread onto the cases which would explain their outcomes in a principled fashion.” I had understood this to be my job.
Suppose all this is wrong, however, and Vail’s contract really did give him a Fourteenth Amendment property right; still, he would have a Fourteenth Amendment claim only if the breach of contract “deprived” him of that right. Whether it did depends on the precise content of the right. “Property interests .. . are created and their dimensions are defined by existing rules or understandings that stem from an independent source such as state law.” Board of Regents v. Roth, supra, 408 U.S. at 577, 92 S.Ct. at 2709 (emphasis added). So we must determine exactly what right Vail’s contract gave him under the laws of Illinois.
An employee complaining of a breach of an employment contract under Illinois law has a right to damages for the breach, but not a right to specific performance of the contract, Zannis v. Lakeshore Radiologists, Ltd., 73 Ill.App.3d 901, 29 Ill.Dec. 569, 392 N.E.2d 126 (1979), to reinstatement in other words; and Judge Eschbach points out that this principle was applied to nontenured teachers in Bessler v. Board of Educ., 69 Ill.2d 191, 13 Ill.Dec. 23, 370 N.E,2d 1050 (1977). As Holmes, writing of contract rights in general, said, “The only universal consequence of a legally binding promise is, that the law makes the promisor pay damages if the promised event does not come to pass. In every case it leaves him free from interference until the time for fulfillment has gone by, and therefore free to break his contract if he chooses.” The Common Law 301 (1881). Vail never had a right to performance of the contract — a right to force the school board to keep him. He had only a right to performance or damages for nonperformance. The state would have deprived Vail of this disjunctive right only if it had refused to pay him damages for *1453breaking its contract, and it has not refused; if he can prove that the contract was broken, the state through its court system will give him damages. See Ill.Rev.Stat. 1981, ch. 122, § 10-2; Jewell v. Board of Educ., 19 Ill.App.3d 1091, 312 N.E.2d 659 (1974); Piper v. Board of Trustees, 99 Ill.App.3d 752, 55 Ill.Dec. 287, 426 N.E.2d 262 (1981); cf. Powell v. Jones, 56 Ill.2d 70, 77-78, 305 N.E.2d 166, 169-70 (1973).
I am not arguing, as I may seem to be, that Vail failed to exhaust his remedies under state law. I accept that exhaustion normally is not required in section 1983 cases, and is not required here. A requirement of exhaustion would mean that Vail had to sue first in state court but if he lost he could then sue in federal court, like a state prisoner seeking federal habeas corpus. This would assume, however, that the state had deprived Vail of a constitutionally protected interest such as property, and that the only question was whether he could complain of that deprivation in federal court before seeing what relief he could get in state court. But since the right Vail was allegedly deprived of is just a right to a particular remedy — damages—he cannot complain that he has been deprived of that right unless the state fails to provide him with the remedy, and if there is no deprivation, there is no cause of action under section 1983. As there is no suggestion that the State of Illinois does not provide remedies in its courts for breaches of contracts with public school employees, I do not see how we can conclude that Vail has been deprived of any right given him by the state, or even that he has alleged such a deprivation.
Concurring in Parratt v. Taylor, 451 U.S. 527, 101 S.Ct. 1908, 68 L.Ed.2d 420 (1981), Justice Stewart — the author of Roth and Sindermann — asked hypothetically whether “damages to a person’s automobile resulting from a collision with a vehicle negligently operated by a state official” would be “a deprivation of property within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment,” and answered that it would not be. 451 U.S. at 544-45, 101 S.Ct. at 1917. He could not have meant that the automobile was not property; he must have meant that negligent damage to it would not be a deprivation of property. Justice Powell’s concurring opinion in the same case explains why: “under state law no remedy other than tort law protects property from interferences caused by the negligence of others.... [Tjherefore, ... the enjoyment of property free of negligent interference is not sufficiently ‘guaranteed’ by state law to justify a due process claim based on official negligence.” Id. at 549 n. 7, 101 S.Ct. at 1920 n. 7. Just as the State of Illinois has not promised to protect Vail’s property from negligent harm, but only to give him a damages remedy for the harm, it did not promise that the school board would employ him for the full term of his contract but only that he would have a damages remedy for breach of contract if it did not. There is no suggestion that the state means to renege on that promise.
This analysis reinforces my previous point that a contract right, as such, is not property. We infer the existence of a property right from the remedies the law gives to protect it. A right protected by an injunction, by specific performance, or by criminal penalties is a property right. But if the only remedy the law provides for some wrong is damages, we speak of a liability rule rather than of a property right. See Calabresi & Melamed, Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral, 85 Harv.L.Rev. 1089, 1092, 1125 (1972). You have a property right against (most) deliberate takings of your car but not against its being demolished in an accidental collision with another car, even if the driver of that car is negligent, and you are not; your only right is to damages. No more has the employee under an employment contract the right to ask a court of equity or the criminal justice authorities to prevent a breach of the contract. His only right, like that of a victim of negligence, is to have the employer held liable for damages, and it is not a property right.
But even if Vail had a property right and the state deprived him of it, his claim fails *1454because there was no denial of due process. Due process does not always require that you get a hearing before rather than after your property is taken. Sutton v. City of Milwaukee, 672 F.2d 644 (7th Cir.1982). To hold that the deprivation in this case required a hearing in advance is to require the states in the name of the Constitution to set up special tribunals to adjudicate all contract disputes (at the very least all employment-contract disputes) that might result in a state agency’s terminating a contract. Vail could have sued the school board in state court for breach of contract, as I have already pointed out; and if he had done so he would have received a hearing that satisfied the requirements of due process.
What indeed would be the purpose of.a “predeprivation” hearing in this case? Since state law allows the school board to break its contracts with probationary employees such as Vail for any reason or no reason, provided only that it is willing to pay the employee’s damages, the employee has little to gain from such a hearing. It is not as if Vail had been fired for cause, and there was a question whether he really had given cause; then a hearing might help. The only hearing that could help him would be a hearing for the purpose of adjudicating that there was a breach of contract and computing his damages if a breach was found. He can get that kind of hearing in state court by suing for breach of contract; he cannot get it from the school board.
In deciding what process is due, and specifically whether a predeprivation hearing is required or whether a postdeprivation hearing is good enough, the courts consider as one factor the gravity of the deprivation complained of. See, e.g., Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319, 335, 96 S.Ct. 893, 903, 47 L.Ed.2d 18 (1976); Sutton v. City of Milwaukee, supra, 672 F.2d at 645—46. But it borders on the melodramatic to describe what happened to Vail, in Judge Eschbach’s words, as “termination of a person’s livelihood .... ” Vail was fired in breach of a contract. The wrong done to him was a type of wrong that traditionally has not been thought so grievous that it cannot be adequately remedied by a suit for damages. That is all he is suing for in federal court. As long as he can seek damages in a suit in a state court that is not alleged to harbor prejudices against this class of litigants or to follow unfair or inadequate procedures, I cannot see that the state has treated him in the arbitrary fashion that one associates with denying a person due process of law.
In suggesting that common law remedies may, in some cases of alleged deprivation of property rights, provide all the process that is due, I am not making a new argument. Parratt v. Taylor, 451 U.S. 527, 101 S.Ct. 1908, 68 L.Ed.2d 420 (1981), held that state prison officers had not denied a prisoner due process by negligently losing his hobby kit. He had an adequate common law remedy, which was all the process that was due him since “the deprivation did not occur as a result of some established state procedure. Indeed, the deprivation occurred as a result of the unauthorized failure of agents of the state to follow established state procedure.” Id. at 543, 101 S.Ct. at 1917. In this case too, any deprivation of property was due to the defendants’ “unauthorized failure ... to follow established state procedures” regarding the honoring of contracts, and the plaintiff had ah adequate common law remedy, as is shown by the fact that the district court awarded Vail just his common law contract damages. In contrast, in Logan v. Zimmerman Brush Co., 455 U.S. 422, 102 S.Ct. 1148, 71 L.Ed.2d 265 (1982), the common law remedy was inadequate. 102 S.Ct. at 1158.
I admit that the facts of Parratt are very different from those of this case; and maybe Judge Wood is right in thinking that Logan has clipped Hawaii's wings. There is undoubted tension between Parratt and the case that made 42 U.S.C. § 1983 what it is today, Monroe v. Pape, 365 U.S. 167, 81 S.Ct. 473, 5 L.Ed.2d 492 (1961). Monroe held that police brutality was actionable under section 1983 regardless of what tort remedies the victim might have against the police under state law. (“The complaint alleges that 13 Chicago police officers broke into petitionérs’ home in the early morning, *1455routed them from bed, made them stand naked in the living room, and ransacked every room, emptying drawers and ripping mattress covers. It further alleges that Mr. Monroe was then taken to the police station and detained on ‘open charges’ for 10 hours, while he was interrogated about a two-day-old murder, that he was not taken before a magistrate, though one was accessible, that he was not permitted to call his family or attorney, that he was subsequently released without criminal charges being preferred against him. It is alleged that the officers had no search warrant and no arrest warrant .... ” Id. at 169, 81 S.Ct. at 474.) Though it is too soon to know where the line will be drawn between Parratt and Monroe, or even whether both decisions will endure, it is at least possible that simple breaches of contract (assuming, as I do not, that they automatically cause “deprivations” of “property”) will be held to fall on the Parratt side. When Monroe was decided, state tort remedies against police officers were considered worthless. See Foote, Tort Remedies for Police Violations of Individual Rights, 39 Minn.L.Rev. 493 (1955). That was a reason for ignoring them in deciding what process was due. My brethren do not question the effectiveness of state contract remedies.
Another basis for distinguishing Monroe and Parratt is suggested in Duncan v. Poythress, 657 F.2d 691, 704-05 (5th Cir.1981), cert. dismissed as improvidently granted, - U.S. -, 103 S.Ct. 368, 74 L.Ed.2d 504 (1982), and in Judge Wood’s decision for a panel of this circuit in Wolf-Lillie v. Sonquist, 699 F.2d 864 (7th Cir.1983): Parratt applies where the only violation of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is a denial of due process in its original sense of proper procedure, Monroe where the violation involves a breach of one of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights (in Monroe itself, the Fourth Amendment, see 365 U.S. at 171, 81 S.Ct. at 475) that have been applied to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. 699 F.2d at 871-72. The Bill of Rights protects the interests of unpopular or vulnerable groups and it is natural to be concerned about the adequacy of their legal remedies. Football coaches do not comprise such a group and Vail makes no claim under the Bill of Rights.
No doubt Parratt can be read even more narrowly than I have done — maybe so narrowly as not to affect this case at all. There is an argument for reading Supreme Court decisions narrowly: it is a busy court and cannot foresee and be taken to approve every potential application of its opinions if they are read broadly. But why my brethren choose to read a recent Supreme Court decision (Parratt) narrowly, and on older one (Sindermann) broadly, eludes me. If Sindermann were construed as narrowly as Judge Wood’s and Judge Eschbach’s opinions in this case construe Parratt, then Sin-dermann clearly would not be controlling either.
If my brethren think Parratt a sport, they should say so, rather than try to distinguish it on factitious grounds, such as that it applies only to negligent deprivations of property, as argued by Judge Eschbach. That reading of Parratt is inconsistent with several recent decisions of this court, including Judge Wood’s decision of a few weeks ago in Wolf-Lillie. That was not a case of negligent deprivation. Nor was Ellis v. Hamilton, 669 F.2d 510 (7th Cir.1982), which Wolf-Lillie cites for the proposition that Parratt “requires federal courts to consider the adequacy and availability of remedies under state law before concluding that a deprivation of life, liberty, or property violates due process of law.” 699 F.2d at 871. Wolf-Lillie involved “a pervasive pattern of executing invalid writs of restitution” by Sheriff Sonquist’s deputies with his knowledge. Id. at 870. Judge Wood did not call this conduct “negligent.” He could not have; the conduct was intentional tortfeas-ing.
Nor can Parratt be easily distinguished on the ground that, in Judge Eschbach’s words, the conduct of the defendants here was not merely “ministerial” or “mindless.” Any deprivation of Vail’s right resulted from the isolated action of a single school board; the state was not implicated. That *1456is another possible difference between this case and Logan v. Zimmerman Brush Co., supra, where in distinguishing Parratt the Supreme Court said that “Logan is challenging not the Commission’s error [the Illinois Fair Employment Practices Commission, corresponding to the school board in this case], but the ‘established state procedure’ that destroys his entitlement without according him proper procedural safeguards.” 102 S.Ct. at 1158. True, the members of the school board in this case are more responsible officials than the prison employees who lost the hobby kit in Par-ratt. But in Flower Cab Co. v. Petitte, 685 F.2d 192 (7th Cir.1982), this court applied the principle of Parratt to a property deprivation by Chicago’s Commissioner of Consumer Services. If Judge Eschbach is entitled to ignore Petitte, not to mention Wolf-Lillie and Ellis, I do not see why I should feel bound by Hostrop.
Furthermore, while some breaches of contract are intentional and some others are negligent, nothing in the law of contracts requires that a breach be either intentional or negligent to be actionable. A garden-variety breach of contract is even less culpable than the garden-variety tort involved in Parratt. Breach of contract is a strict-liability concept. Outside the limited shelter given by impossibility and related doctrines, a party who breaks his contract is liable for the consequences of the breach even if it was due to events completely beyond his control — even if it was involuntary, and so in a sense “mindless.” If Parratt confines the victim of negligent conduct to his remedies (provided they are adequate) under state law, it should likewise confine the victim of unavoidable conduct.
But forget Parratt, and my basic point remains: in a case of this sort, where one is about as far away as one can get from the gross police misconduct alleged in Monroe v. Pape, the requirements of due process are satisfied by the remedies that the state provides in its courts for breaches of contract by its school boards. And this is but one of my grounds for arguing that Vail has no right to relief under 42 U.S.C. § 1983; the others, it will be recalled, are that there is no property right at stake in this case and that in any event there has been no deprivation of such a right. I do not argue that any of these grounds possesses apodictic certainty but at least they show that the result in this case is not predestined by existing case law. The Supreme Court has not decided the question in this case. We do that Court a disservice to apply its 1972 decisions in Roth and Sinder-mann to the very different facts of this case, ignoring all that has happened in the law relevant to section 1983 since then, reaching a result that is contrary to every principle of federalism and good sense, and putting the blame on the Court. I have tried very hard but without success to think of a reason why a football coach should be allowed to litigate his contract claim against a school board in a federal district court. I get no help in this endeavor from being told by Judge Eschbach that this case is about the “termination of a person’s livelihood,” or by Judge Wood that football coaches “are generally not second class members of a balanced school program.” We are witnessing the trivialization of the Constitution. I regret almost more than I can say that my brethren’s method of interpreting precedent has led them to take another step on the road whose terminus is the displacement of the whole of state law into the federal courts.