Court Opinion

ID: 9652094
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 17:16:33.439668+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:48.071575
License: Public Domain

Kenison, C. J.,
dissenting: The statute (RSA 284:3), which is the sole cause of the plaintiff’s dismissal from his employment, is based on residence alone and the competence, skill or integrity of the employee is immaterial. Certainly we are not justified in talcing judicial notice that the probity and stability of the plaintiff and other Vermont employees are inferior to that of New Hampshire employees. The presumption of constitutionality to which the statute is entitled (Chronicle &c. Pub. Co. v. Attorney General, 94 N. H. 148), will not give it a protective veneer of rationality, if it is pock-marked by invalid discrimination. State v. Moore, 91 N. H. 16. The statute does not meet the test of equality as it has been understood and developed in this state. State v. Pennoyer, 65 N. H. 113; State v. Moore, supra. I am in full accord with the law and authorities cited in the third paragraph of the court’s opinion and regret that it has failed *274to follow and apply them to this case.
Implicit in the majority opinion are cases which limit employment on State construction to residents such as Heim v. McCall, 239 U. S. 175 and Crane v. New York, 239 U. S. 195 decided in 1915. As constitutional currency these cases have had a declining value ever since one year from their birth when they were subjected to critical analysis in Powell, The Right to Work for the State, 16 Colum. L. Rev. 99 (1916). “It is now axiomatic that the equal protection clause is as fully applicable to public benefits and public employment as to other actions of a state. But it was not always so. The clause had been part of the Constitution for seventy years before the Supreme Court wholly repudiated [Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U. S. 337 (1938)] the notion that a state’s power to withhold from all carried with it, to some undefined extent, a special license to withhold from one group while granting to another.” Willcox, Invasions of the First Amendment Through Conditioned Public Spending, 41 Cornell L. Q. 12, 15 (1955).
It is argued that racing and gambling is subject to abuse and therefore can be prohibited or strictly regulated under the police power. This argument may be readily conceded but it does not follow that the power to prohibit or regulate encompasses the right to do it by discriminatory methods. Note, Unconstitutional Conditions, 73 Harv. L. Rev. 1595 (1960). There is a certain surface logic to the proposition that if gambling and horse racing is a privilege, the State may attach such conditions to the privilege as it chooses. But the proposition is fallacious and it proves too much, as has been convincingly demonstrated in Van Alstyne, The Demise of the Right-Privilege Distinction in Constitutional Law, 81 Harv. L. Rev. 1439 (1968).
Emphasis in the court’s opinion has been placed on the social evils and the social problems connected with race tracks and gambling. A flint-eyed realist would recall what this court said in North Hampton &c. Assn. v. Commission, 94 N. H. 156, 162: “It is a matter of common knowledge of which we can take judicial notice that the strongest . . . motivating factor in favor of and which brought about the enactment of the law originally was the promise of substantial revenue that the State would derive from the granting of the privilege to conduct pari-mutuel racing.” See Hoffheimer, Some Horse Racing Tips for Lawyers, *27550 A.B.A.J. 250 (1964). 1 cannot believe that the benign quota of 15% nonresidents tolerated by the statute (RSA 284:3) is relevant, necessary or constitutional in 1969. It is ironic that discrimination which is prohibited by statute and judicial decision in most other areas should be retained on the tenuous basis of non-residence. I conclude the statute is discriminatory and invalid.