Court Opinion

ID: 9469388
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:39:14.711834+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:21.904273
License: Public Domain

SLOVITER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I would affirm the judgment of the district court that the fees held in escrow by defendant be refunded with interest to the individuals who had deposited them because I believe that the statute pursuant to which they were collected violates the Equal Protection Clause.
The district court concluded that New Jersey’s matrimonial fee system neither employed any suspect classification nor impinged on any fundamental right, and therefore it used the rational basis standard in its constitutional analysis. Murillo v. Bambrick, 508 F.Supp. 830, 833 (D.N.J.1981). The district court correctly held that no suspect classification is involved in this case. However, I conclude from the line of Supreme Court precedent holding that the right to marry is fundamental that the correlative right to obtain a divorce is fundamental, that therefore the classification imposed in the statute before us is subject to heightened judicial scrutiny, and that it cannot survive such scrutiny.
In Boddie v. Connecticut, 401 U.S. 371, 91 S.Ct. 780, 28 L.Ed.2d 113 (1971), the Supreme Court held that a Connecticut statute imposing filing and service fees of approximately sixty dollars on civil litigants violated the Due Process Clause when it was applied to indigents seeking to bring an action for divorce. The Court held that because the state had a monopoly of the means for legally dissolving the marriage relationship, it could not deny some of its citizens access to its courts for that purpose by imposing fees which they were unable to pay. Justices Douglas and Brennan would also have held that the Equal Protection Clause precludes conditioning access to the courts upon ability to pay in all manner of cases, not merely divorce actions. The opinion of the Court, however, predicated its holding on “the basic position of the marriage relationship in this society’s hierarchy of values.” Id. at 374, 91 S.Ct. at 784. Several times in that opinion, the Court emphasized the fundamental nature of the right at issue. It stated “marriage involves interests of basic importance in our society,” id. at 376, 91 S.Ct. at 785, referred to the “special nature of the divorce action”, id. at 381 n.8, 91 S.Ct. at 787 n.8, and characterized divorce as “the adjustment of a fundamental human relationship.” Id. at 383, 91 S.Ct. at 788 (emphasis added).
The due process problem involved in Bod-die is not presented by N.J.StatAnn. *914§ 2A:34-16 which contained an exemption for “actions in forma pauperis”. Nonetheless, that case is significant because of the Court’s recognition of the right to divorce as fundamental. Two years after Boddie, the Court affirmed that the holding in Bod-die was predicated on the fundamental nature of the right to obtain a divorce. In United States v. Kras, 409 U.S. 434, 93 S.Ct. 631, 34 L.Ed.2d 626 (1973), the Court upheld a provision of the Bankruptcy Act, 11 U.S.C. § 32(b)(2), imposing filing fees for actions in bankruptcy against due process and equal protection challenges by indigents. The Court distinguished Boddie, stating:
The denial of access to the judicial forum in Boddie touched directly, as has been noted, on the marital relationship and on the associational interests that surround the establishment and dissolution of that relationship. On many occasions we have recognized the fundamental importance of these interests under our Constitution.... [In contrast,] [w]e see no fundamental interest that is gained or lost depending on the availability of discharge in bankruptcy.
... Bankruptcy is hardly akin to free speech or marriage or to those other rights, so many of which are imbedded in the First Amendment, that the Court has come to regard as fundamental and that demand the lofty requirement of a compelling governmental interest before they may be significantly regulated.... This being so, the applicable standard ... is that of rational justification.
409 U.S. at 44A-46, 93 S.Ct. at 637-638.
Most recently, in Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. 374, 98 S.Ct. 673, 54 L.Ed.2d 618 (1978), the Court reiterated that the right to marry (and with it the right to divorce) is fundamental, one of the “personal decisions protected by the right of privacy.” Id. at 384, 98 S.Ct. at 679. At issue in that case was a Wisconsin statute which provided that any resident who had a judicially imposed support obligation for minor children not in his or her custody could not marry, within the state or elsewhere, without first obtaining court permission to marry. The Court emphasized that “[t]he freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” id. at 383, 98 S.Ct. at 679 (quoting Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12, 87 S.Ct. 1817, 1823, 18 L.Ed.2d 1010 (1967)), and reaffirmed that the fundamental nature of the right to marry applied equally to the right to obtain a divorce. Id. 434 U.S. at 385 n.10, 98 S.Ct. at 680 n.10. The Court held that because “the right to marry is of fundamental importance” and the classification significantly interfered with the exercise of that right, it was necessary to undertake a “critical examination” of the state interests advanced in support of the classification. The Court held that the statutory classification could not be justified by the interests advanced in support of it, and therefore violated the Equal Protection Clause. Id. at 383, 390-91, 98 S.Ct. at 679, 683.
In light of this line of precedent, the reluctance of the majority to recognize the existence of a fundamental right to divorce is inexplicable. It is even more perplexing because the majority concedes the proposition that the right to marry is fundamental. It gives no cogent reason for differentiating between the right to marry and the right to divorce. See Majority op. at 903 n.9. Both logic and practicality require that marriage and divorce be considered correlative. See Developments in the Law: The Constitution and the Family, 93 Harv.L.Rev. 1156, 1311 (1980). In no state in this country can one marry if a previous marriage to someone still living has not been dissolved by divorce or annulment. Presumably the majority would agree that the right to marry is not limited to the right to marry only once. Furthermore, even married persons who do not wish to remarry have a fundamental right to resume single-hood.
Because the right to marry inheres in the right to privacy, and the Court has recognized that “it would make little sense” to recognize a right of privacy with respect to *915some but not all matters of family life, see Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. at 386, 98 S.Ct. at 681, it follows that the same considerations apply to the right to dissolve the marriage relationship. The Court expressly intertwined those rights in United States v. Kras, 409 U.S. at 444, 93 S.Ct. at 637, when it referred to the “associational interests that surround the establishment and dissolution of the [marital] relationship” and the “fundamental importance of these interests under our Constitution.” Therefore, I believe we must start our analysis of the statutory classification with the principle that we are dealing with a fundamental right, the right to divorce.
Zabloeki teaches not only that the right to marry and divorce are to be considered as fundamental rights for purposes of equal protection analysis, but also that a heightened scrutiny is appropriate even when the statutory classification does not absolutely prevent either marriage or divorce. The Court noted that there were “[m]any [persons], able in theory to satisfy the statute’s requirements, [who] will be sufficiently burdened by having to do so that they will in effect be coerced into forgoing their right to marry.” 434 U.S. at 387, 98 S.Ct. at 681. The inquiry made by the Court was whether the statutory classification “directly and substantially” interfered with the right to marry. Id. This is consistent with the approach taken by the Court in considering the burden of justification to be met by statutory classifications affecting other fundamental rights.
In Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U.S. 330, 337, 92 S.Ct. 995, 1000, 31 L.Ed.2d 274 (1972), the Court invoked strict scrutiny in invalidating a durational residency requirement for voting which directly impinged on two fundamental rights, the right to vote and the right to interstate travel. In explaining its use of that standard even though the Tennessee statute did not completely deny the right to travel, the Court stated:
Of course, it is true that the two individual interests affected by Tennessee’s dura-tional residence requirements are affected in different ways. Travel is permitted, but only at a price; voting is prohibited. The right to travel is merely penalized, while.the right to vote is absolutely denied. But these differences are irrelevant for present purposes. Shapiro [v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618, 89 S.Ct. 1322, 22 L.Ed.2d 600 (1969)] implicitly realized what this Court has made explicit elsewhere:
“It has long been established that a State may not impose a penalty upon those who exercise a right guaranteed by the Constitution.... ”
Id. at 341, 92 S.Ct. at 1002 (citation omitted). See L. Tribe, American Constitutional Law 1005 n.18 (1978). This approach is equally applicable to burdens on the right of marriage and divorce, for, as the Court stated in Zablocki, “[E]ven those who can be persuaded to meet the statute’s requirements suffer a serious intrusion into their freedom of choice in an area in which we have held such freedom to be fundamental.” 434 U.S. at 387, 98 S.Ct. at 681 (footnote omitted).
Of course, not every classification which may affect the marital relationship in any way warrants strict scrutiny. For example, in Califano v. Jobst, 434 U.S. 47, 98 S.Ct. 95, 54 L.Ed.2d 228 (1977), the Court had applied the rational basis test in rejecting an equal protection challenge to a provision of the Social Security Act terminating, under certain circumstances, a dependent child’s Social Security benefits when the child married. The Court subsequently characterized Califano v. Jobst as a case involving “legislation providing governmental payments of monetary benefits that has an incidental effect on a protected liberty.” Califano v. Aznavorian, 439 U.S. 170, 177, 99 S.Ct. 471, 475, 58 L.Ed.2d 435 (1978). In the Zabloeki opinion which was decided the same term and only shortly after Califano v. Jobst, the Court stated “[b]y reaffirming the fundamental character of the right to marry, we do not mean to suggest that every state regulation which relates in any way to the incidents of or prerequisites for marriage must be subjected to rigorous scrutiny.” 434 U.S. at 386, 98 S.Ct. at 681. The Za-bloeki majority distinguished Zabloeki from *916the earlier Califano v. Jobst case on the basis of the “directness and substantiality of the interference with the freedom to marry.” 434 U.S. at 387 n.12, 98 S.Ct. at 681 n.12.
The majority in this case adroitly sidesteps deciding whether the New Jersey statute trenched upon a fundamental interest by concluding the statute “did not ‘significantly’ or ‘directly or substantially’ infringe upon the right of individuals to obtain dissolutions of their marriages.” Majority op. at 903. The majority reaches its conclusion in the face of the contrary findings of the district court. That court found that although Murillo did not qualify as an indigent, at the time that she initiated these proceedings she was working as a domestic and earning $25.00 to $28.00 per day. The district court concluded that “[t]he State of New Jersey had thus placed plaintiff in a dilemma: either she would have had to pay what was to her a substantial sum to sue for divorce; or she would have remained hostage to a marriage which under the substantive law of the State she was entitled to have dissolved.” 508 F.Supp. at 832. Even if the majority can formulate some basis to reject these findings, which indicate more than a mere incidental effect on the exercise of the right to obtain a divorce, it provides no record basis to support its own contrary conclusion. See Pullman-Standard v. Swint, - U.S. -, - -, 102 S.Ct. 1781, 1788-1790, 72 L.Ed.2d 66 (1982). Essentially all the majority relies upon is the principle, patently unassailable, that the state has the right to collect a portion of its expenses from those persons who seek a divorce. It appears to me the majority has intermingled two analytically distinct issues: whether there is a sufficient impact or burden imposed by the classification to warrant use of the strict scrutiny standard in the first place, and whether the classification survives the application of that level of scrutiny. In analyzing whether there is a sufficiently substantial burden to warrant use of the strict scrutiny standard, I would look both to the district court’s findings and the undisputed fact that the matrimonial fee penalized each New Jersey resident (with the exception of indigents) who sought to exercise his or her right to obtain a divorce. These evince a sufficiently direct and sweeping burden on a fundamental right to subject the classification to heightened judicial scrutiny. The majority’s statement that the “hardship” on individuals such as Murillo “although unfortunate, falls short of establishing that such persons have been precluded from obtaining divorces”, Majority op. at 904 (emphasis added), overlooks the Supreme Court precedent discussed supra at pp. 914-915 where the Court stated that total preclusion is not a prerequisite to invocation of strict scrutiny.
Turning then to the question whether the classification can withstand such heightened scrutiny, it is necessary to consider whether the statutory classification “is supported by sufficiently important state interests and is closely tailored to effectuate only those interests. See, e.g., Carey v. Population Services International, 431 U.S. 678, at 686, 97 S.Ct. 2010, at 2016, 52 L.Ed.2d 675; Memorial Hospital v. Marico-pa County, 415 U.S. 250, at 262-263, 94 S.Ct. 1076, at 1084, 39 L.Ed.2d 306; San Antonio Independent School Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S., at 16-17, 93 S.Ct, at 1287-1288; Bullock v. Carter, 405 U.S. 134, 144, 92 S.Ct. 849, 856, 31 L.Ed.2d 92 (1972).” Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. at 388, 98 S.Ct. at 682. Burdens which operate directly upon fundamental rights, including the right to marry or to obtain a divorce, are not necessarily constitutionally infirm. “[A] state may legitimately say that no one can marry his or her sibling, that no one can marry who is not at least 14 years old, that no one can marry without first passing an examination for venereal disease, or that no one can marry who has a living husband or wife.” Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. at 392, 98 S.Ct. at 684 (Stewart, J., concurring). The legitimate and justifiable objectives served by such statutory requirements are evident.
In Sosna v. Iowa, 419 U.S. 393, 95 S.Ct. 553, 42 L.Ed.2d 532 (1975), the Court upheld an Iowa one-year durational residency re*917quirement for persons seeking a divorce. Without indicating which standard of review it was employing, the Court focused on “the state interest in requiring that those who seek a divorce from its courts be genuinely attached to the State, as well as a desire to insulate divorce decrees from the likelihood of collateral attack.” Id. at 409, 95 S.Ct. at 562. The Court found that because the Constitution permits other states to disregard a finding of domicile entered in an ex parte proceeding in the face of “cogent evidence” to the contrary, it was “quite permissible” for Iowa to infer that the one-year residency requirement “provides a greater safeguard against successful collateral attack than would a requirement of bona fide residence alone.” Id. at 408, 95 S.Ct. at 561 (footnote omitted).1 It is noteworthy that in Sosna the Court stated that once the one-year period expired, Sosna “could ultimately have obtained the same opportunity for adjudication which she asserts ought to have been hers at an earlier point in time.” Id. at 406, 95 S.Ct. at 560. In contrast, the New Jersey special matrimonial fee imposed a permanent burden which would not automatically be removed by the passage of time.
In this case the State has not always posited the legislative objective behind the special matrimonial fee with either clarity or consistency. New Jersey originally sought to justify the fee on the basis of the following factors listed in its Answers to Interrogatories:
A. Judge’s time spent on matrimonial eases, including the fact that all matrimonial cases require bench time.
B. Additional time spent by the Clerk of the Superior Court’s office including verification of an Answer, verification to see if default properly entered, and verification of the service upon the defendant.
C. Additional post-judgment time spent on matrimonial vs. other cases.
D. Trial fee encourages reflective thought.
According to the State itself, at trial “the first three contentions were withdrawn” but “the fourth was maintained in a somewhat modified form, with the State arguing that the additional fees would serve the State public policy of not encouraging divorces.” Brief on Behalf of Defendant-Appellant at 7-8. On appeal the State shifted its position and, at least as now reformulated by the majority, the rationale posited for the special matrimonial fee is that “it would not have been unreasonable for the Legislature to have been of the opinion that the State’s divorce system made financial as well as non-financial demands upon the judiciary, thereby justifying additional monetary support from the users of that system”. Majority op. at 906.2 This appears to be in substance the rationale which the State expressly abandoned in the trial court.3 It is also at variance with the pur*918pose ascribed to the special matrimonial fee by the New Jersey Legislature when it repealed that fee.4
The district court summarized the State’s contention as “that the matrimonial fees provided a means of supporting the additional court costs required to give divorce cases the high degree of scrutiny required under New Jersey law.” 508 F.Supp. at 835-36. In considering this argument, notwithstanding its withdrawal by the State, the district court found:
Although a minority of actions, filed on the basis of fault, may still require special judicial scrutiny, most matrimonial litigants require no extraordinary judicial supervision. Indeed, it was demonstrated at trial that the average cost of disposing of a matrimonial case was significantly less than the average cost of adjudicating other civil actions.
508 F.Supp. at 836 (emphasis in original; footnote omitted). The State does not dispute this factual finding.
As I understand the State’s contention on appeal, it is that it is irrelevant whether in fact matrimonial cases “require additional monies to operate in conformity with state law” because under the rational basis standard it is sufficient if the legislature may have reasonably, albeit erroneously, thought they did or predicted they would. The majority appears to have accepted this position. I need not comment on whether the majority has appropriately applied the rational basis standard, because I believe it is evident that the statutory classification cannot stand under the heightened scrutiny which I would apply. If the statute is not “closely tailored to effectuate only [the important state] interests,” then it cannot be sustained. The matrimonial fees cannot be necessary or “closely tailored” to defray the higher costs of divorce actions when, as a factual matter, those higher costs do not exist. Moreover, there is some question whether burdens on fundamental rights can be defended on financial grounds alone. See Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. at 633, 89 S.Ct. at 1330. See also Sosna v. Iowa, 419 U.S. at 406, 95 S.Ct. at 560 (“Iowa’s residency requirement may reasonably be justified on grounds other than purely budgetary considerations or administrative convenience”) (emphasis added).
The majority, in attempting to support its position that the special divorce fee does not “significantly” or “directly or substantially” infringe upon the right to divorce, has made arguments which appear to be directed to whether that fee, even if it imposes a burden, can be justified. Thus, for example, the majority mischaracterizes the challenge to the fee as, in effect, a claim that the State must provide a “free divorce.” Murillo does not claim that she is entitled to a free divorce, but only that her exercise of her right to a divorce should not be penalized by imposing upon her a fee *919higher than that for other litigants. She is not making a due process challenge but an equal protection challenge, concepts -which the majority has confused. Therefore, the majority’s suggestion that Murillo’s challenge could also be leveled at “the seventy-five dollar filing fee currently required of all litigants”, Majority op. at 905, misconceives the nature of the constitutional challenge. The equal protection attack on the matrimonial fee is premised on the fact that litigants seeking a divorce were singled out for discriminatory treatment because they were the only litigants required to pay a special fee. It is completely beside the point that the State uses the filing fee to seek to defray some of the costs of terminating the marital relationship. Presumably that is the basis on which the State charges a filing fee to any litigant. The State produced no evidence that there was any basis to charge a matrimonial litigant a higher fee; it ultimately abandoned the argument that there was any empirical basis for such a higher fee, and in fact it is currently charging all litigants the same general filing fee, which it increased from $60 to $75 in 1981 “to adjust for the elimination of the matrimonial fees and to compensate for inflationary pressures.” See note 4 supra.
Because a fee for filing divorce actions directly affected the exercise of a fundamental interest, the statute must withstand heightened scrutiny, not the inadequate level of scrutiny used by the majority. Using what I believe is the correct level of scrutiny, the classification must fall.5

. The majority suggests that Sosna may be read as support for the proposition that divorce does not implicate any fundamental right. Majority op. at 903 n.9. Sosna, however, never addressed the issue. Any inference to be drawn from Sosna respecting the right to divorce would seem to apply equally to the right to interstate travel, also at issue in that case, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly held to be fundamental.

. The State’s suggestion that because this is an equal protection case, the trial court must consider any conceivable rationale, whether or not it was raised, and that we in turn have an obligation to consider the State’s contentions, whether or not raised below, is at variance with our oft-stated view that we will ordinarily not consider issues on appeal that were not presented to the trial court. See, e.g., Newark Morning Ledger Co. v. United States, 539 F.2d 929, 932-33 (3d Cir. 1976).

. The majority does not reach the State’s contention that the matrimonial fee “encourages reflective thought” and thereby serves the State’s interest in “not encouraging divorce”. The trial court found that since the enactment of no-fault divorce in 1971, the purpose to discourage divorces has not existed. Subsequent statutory enactments may show abandonment of a prior legislative purpose. Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 448, 92 S.Ct. 1029, 1035, 31 L.Ed.2d 349 (1972). In any event, the State offered no basis for finding any connection between the special matrimonial fee and encouraging reflective thought before divorce. The numerous waiting periods already contained in New Jersey’s substantive law of divorce, N.J.Stat.Ann. § 2A:34-2, provide an ef*918fective and more closely tailored means for the state to insure that its citizens do not hastily and unreflectingly seek a divorce.

. According to the legislative statement which accompanied the repealer of the fee,
These proposed amendments to the New Jersey court fee system would serve two purposes. First, they would eliminate the approval fee required in matrimonial cases before the Superior Court — currently, these fees are $50.00 in uncontested cases and $60.00 in contested cases. Secondly, this legislation would increase the general fee for the filing of all civil complaints from $60.00 to $75.00.
In the past, the $50.00 or $60.00 differential required for matrimonial cases was justified by an additional review provided in such cases by a standing master who determined whether or not the matter was fít for trial. Today, no similar review exists to justify any such differential in fees. As a result, these approval fees for matrimonial cases have been questioned as an unreasonable classification in an action pending before the Federal district court. The elimination of these fees would thus serve to eliminate an anachronism from the court’s fee structure.
The simultaneous increase in the general filing fee for all civil complaints, from $60.00 to $75.00, is a necessary increase in court revenues to adjust for the elimination of the matrimonial fees and to compensate for inflationary pressures.
1980 N.J.Sess.Law Serv., ch. 80, at 271 (emphasis added). I see no reason why the majority’s hypothetical rationale for the special matrimonial fee should be preferred over that given by the legislature itself.

. I cannot avoid noting that the district court has indicated that it would have originally granted an injunction to enjoin collection of the fee had it decided the case when it was first presented because it believed the matrimonial fee was unconstitutional. Transcript of Sept. 10, 1980, at 111. Had it done so, the fund at issue in this case would not have accumulated. It carne into being only because the district court stayed proceedings in order to give the New Jersey Legislature an opportunity to resolve the matter of the matrimonial fee. The district court noted its unhappiness with the action of the New Jersey Legislature which made its abolition of the matrimonial fee prospective only and made no provision for the return of the already collected fees held in escrow pursuant to the district court order. Id at 111-12. Since this fund was created only because of the delay of action by the New Jersey Legislature, it is ironic that it should be permitted by this decision to profit by that very delay.