Court Opinion

ID: 9446225
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:49:30.463706+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:34.439825
License: Public Domain

BAZELON, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I join the court in following the District Court’s construction of Ohio law legitimatizing the wage-earner’s children.
The District Court’s order, however, also directed that child’s insurance benefits be paid to appellee “from and after April 29th 1944.” This is the date of the first application, filed by appellee on her own and the two children’s behalf, which the Bureau of Old Age and Survivors Insurance rejected on July 15, 1944, and which she thereafter abandoned. The application upon which the present suit rests was filed by appellee eleven years later, on June 7, 1955, and only on behalf of the children.
Section 202(j) (1) of the Social Security Act, 42 U.S.C.A. § 402(j) (1), limits retroactivity of benefits to a year prior to the date of the application. The question whether the benefits here involved should be geared to the 1944 application or the 1955 application was not specifically in issue at any stage of the proceedings below. By assuming that appellee’s abandonment of the 1944 application was not binding upon her children, one can gear the benefits to that early application. But what this court, now assumes is a matter that was not considered below. Moreover, the effect of abandonment may well turn upon a finding as to what the attendant circumstances were. I think sound principles, of judicial administration require that the administrative agency be afforded the opportunity, in the first instance, of' passing upon this issue.1 I would therefore reverse and remand to the agency with appropriate instructions for that purpose.

. Other questions not considered below relate to the finality and appealability of the rejection of the 1944 application. These questions as well, I think, should not be disposed of on this appeal. To the extent that they should remain in the case, it would be time enough to consider them judicially after further administrative action.