Court Opinion

ID: 9462362
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:39:21.854469+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:33.631819
License: Public Domain

THORNBERRY, Circuit Judge
(concurring in part and dissenting in part).
I fully concur in Part I of Judge Dyer’s opinion, agreeing with the conclusion that the San Antonio Pension Fund Board of Trustees is not a “person” subject to suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
I find, however, that I am unable to concur in Part II of that opinion, which deals with the amenability of individual Board members to § 1983 suit. Judge Tuttle's indisputably correct observation that such individuals are “persons” under any reasonable definition of that term alone seems to me sufficient to conclude the issue. However certain the Court may be that an action is, “in reality”, one directed at a governmental non-person, the fact is that the named defendants, and the ones against whom equitable relief would run, are persons. If Congress intended the statute to be construed other than in accordance with its natural and literal meaning, it could have given — or could now give — some objective basis for that conclusion. There is none.
Moreover, I seriously doubt the practical ability of the Courts to determine when an action falls within the ambit of the Court’s decision in this case. In a decision that apparently is not overruled by the Court today, we held that individual government officials may be the object of injunctive relief under § 1983, even though that relief would have much the same effect as an injunction directed to the government body itself. United Farmworkers of Fla. Housing Project, Inc. v. City of Delray Beach, 493 F.2d 799 (5 Cir. 1974). Indeed, in prison cases and school cases, to name only a couple of examples, injunctive relief against governmental officials will as clearly require expenditures by those officials from the applicable government coffers as in the action before us. We have also upheld awards of equitable monetary relief directed against individual officials despite the fact that the money would ultimately be paid, through formal or informal indemnification arrangements, by the governmental “non-person” involved. E. g., Gates v. Collier, 489 F.2d 298 (5 Cir. 1973), vacated and remanded on other grounds, 522 F.2d 81 (5 Cir. 1975) (en banc); Harkless v. Sweeny Ind. School Dist., 427 F.2d 319 (5 Cir. 1970).
I do not mean to suggest that it is impossible to draw distinctions between such cases and the one before us today. But I do contend that these cases foreclose a distinction based upon the relatively clear and logical basis of whether the relief sought will ultimately come from the individual who is the immediate subject of the applicable order or the governmental entity with which he is associated. Instead, the Courts will be forced to wrestle, as has this Court, with the vague and elusive question of whether an action is “in reality” or “in sub*504stance” one against a person or a nonperson. It seems to me that, at least as long as the earlier decisions mentioned remain good law, attempts to thwart indirect § 1983 actions against governmental “non-persons” will cause the Courts great difficulty and result in decisions that are lacking in both consistency and logic.
For these reasons, I dissent from Part II of the Court’s opinions.