Court Opinion

ID: 9609349
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 03:26:32.472013+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:20:34.882414
License: Public Domain

ARNOW, Chief District Judge
(dissenting) :
Under the circumstances here presented, due respect to the plaintiff’s choice of a federal forum for resolution of its federal constitutional questions requires that this court not abstain, and for that reason I must respectfully disagree with the majority decision in this case.
The doctrine of abstention originated with Railroad Commission v. Pullman Co., 312 U.S. 496, 61 S.Ct. 643, 85 L.Ed. 971 (1941), which established the principie that a federal court should abstain when a state court’s construction of a state statute could resolve the federal constitutional question.
Although the doctrine has since been expanded, the heart of the abstention doctrine has always been the availability of state construction of state law which could remove the federal question. While it is true that there is language in Reetz v. Bozanich, 397 U.S. 82, 90 S.Ct. 788, 25 L.Ed.2d 68 (1969) and City of Meridian v. Southern Bell Tel. & Tel. Co., 358 U.S. 639, 79 S.Ct. 455, 3 L.Ed. 2d 562 (1959), which indicates a broad approach to the concept of abstention, that concept has never been held proper in a case where state resolution of the question involved would be on the same basis as the federal. See Friendly, Federal Jurisdiction: A General View, at 92. Close analysis of the facts in each of the cited cases indicates that the federal issue could have been avoided in Meridian by interpretation of the contract under state law and in Reetz by a state constitutional provision dealing specifically with fishing.
This case, however, seems directly controlled by Wisconsin v. Constantineau, 400 U.S. 433, 91 S.Ct. 507, 27 L. Ed.2d 515 (1971). In that case, the court held abstention improper when a “due process” attack on a state statute could be considered either under the state or federal constitutions. The court further held that since the statute was unambiguous and the underlying basis of each attack was identical, abstention could serve no useful purpose.
This is precisely the situation here. The only apparent state grounds on which the statute herein involved could be attacked is due process. The equal protection clause of the Florida Constitution, due to its limitation to natural persons, would be inapplicable to corporations.1 Under Georgia Southern *797v. Seven-Up, 175 So.2d 39 (Fla.1965), Florida’s due process standards have been equated to the federal standards. Thus the state would essentially be applying federal law.
The majority opinion also implied that, since the challenge is to a provision of a state regulatory scheme, Burford v. Sun Oil Co., 319 U.S. 315, 63 S.Ct. 1098, 87 L.Ed. 1424 (1942) would require abstention. The mere fact, however, that a regulatory scheme is being challenged does not automatically warrant abstention. The Burford doctrine is largely just a restatement of the basic Pullman concept. The Burford type of abstention is required only when the regulatory scheme is such that state court construction of the entire scheme could eliminate any constitutional challenge to a particular provision. Cf., Askew v. Hargrave, 401 U.S. 476, 91 S.Ct. 856, 28 L.Ed.2d 196 (1971).
The holding of the background case of Sayers v. Forsyth Building Corp., 417 F.2d 65 (5th Cir. 1969), cited in the majority opinion for this type of abstention, appears contrary to the majority’s position. The court therein, while discussing the doctrine of abstention, and in so doing including the language cited in the majority opinion, held that in the case there presented, the federal court should not abstain. The reasoning employed in the opinion, to the undersigned, seems consistent with the reasoning employed in this dissenting opinion.
In the instant situation, there is nothing in the broad banking code that might in any way affect the constitutional challenge to this particular part of the regulatory scheme. What the majority appears to be doing is establishing a much broader abstention doctrine than indicated by the Pullman or Bur-ford line of cases. They would institute a new doctrine that where federal and state issues are involved in the same challenged activity, state issues must first be resolved, even when the challenged statutory provisions are clear and unambiguous on their face, and the state issues are identical to the federal. To do so would cause aggrieved parties unnecessary delay, and could effectively deny them the right to have a federal forum hear their federal claims. The instant case is already old. Resolution of the federal issues here involved might be avoided if plaintiffs, required to resort to the state courts, there prevailed under the state’s due process clause or its equal protection clause, if the state court somehow construed “natural persons” in that clause to include corporations. Absent that, however, such resolution is only postponed unnecessarily, and perhaps for several years. For these reasons, I must respectfully dissent.

. Conceivably, the Florida court could construe “natural persons” in its equal protection clause to include corporations. That clause, for a long time, applied only to “men”; it was by amendment in recent years changed to “natural persons.” It seems clear the change was made to include women and children, with corporations still excluded.