Court Opinion

ID: 9425637
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:15:19.035507+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:56.685439
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Powell,
with whom The Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Rehnquist join, dissenting.
I join the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Rehnquist because I believe he expresses the correct view of the appropriate result when a claim over which a district court has no independent jurisdiction is appended to a constitutional claim that has no hope of success on the merits. A wise exercise of discretion lies at the heart of the doctrine of pendent jurisdiction. E. g., Rosado v. Wyman, 397 U. S. 397, 403 (1970); Mine Workers v. Gibbs, 383 U. S. 715, 726-727 (1966). Compelling a district court to decide an ancillary claim where the premise for its jurisdiction is a meritless constitutional claim does not impress me as an efficacious performance of a discretionary responsibility.
*551I write briefly to emphasize my view that the majority has misread the import of the Gibbs opinion, supra, particularly in the manner in which it links Gibbs to Siler v. Louisville & Nashville R. Co., 213 U. S. 175 (1909), and like cases. Gibbs involved a state claim that arose out of the same transaction as the federal law claim that conferred federal jurisdiction. The majority apparently reads Gibbs and Siler together as mandating decision of the state law claim without regard to the frailty of the federal claim on which federal jurisdiction rests. See ante, at 547, 549-550. In other words, the majority opinion appears to be saying that a federal constitutional claim as marginal as the one at issue here is capable of supporting pendent federal jurisdiction over a state claim and, indeed, that the state claim is to be decided to the exclusion of the federal issue. As I view it, that is a particularly erroneous interpretation of the pendent jurisdiction doctrine. That reading would broaden federal question jurisdiction to encompass matters of state law whenever an imaginative litigant can think up a federal claim, no matter how insubstantial, that is related to the transaction giving rise to the state claim.
This extension of Gibbs is quite unnecessary, since we are not confronted with a case where the pendent claim is a matter of state law. The Court’s dictum could nevertheless prompt other courts to follow it. In view of this potential mischief, I repeat a quotation from Gibbs relied on by my Brother Rehnquist which indicates how far the Court has departed from the rationale of that 1966 precedent:
“[R]ecognition of a federal court’s wide latitude to decide ancillary questions of state law does not imply that it must tolerate a litigant’s effort to impose upon it what is in effect only a state law case. *552Once it appears that a state claim constitutes the real body of a case, to which the federal claim is only an appendage, the state claim may fairly be dismissed.” 383 U. S., at 727.
The correct reading of Gibbs, as a matter of common sense and in light of deeply rooted notions of federalism, is that the federal claim must have more than a glimmer of merit and must continue to do so at least until substantial judicial resources have been committed to the lawsuit. If either of those conditions is not met, a district court has no business deciding issues of state law. District courts are not expositors of state law when jurisdiction is not based on diversity of citizenship.