Court Opinion

ID: 9431565
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:32:34.980597+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:29.056534
License: Public Domain

Justice Sc alia,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I concur in the judgment and join the opinion of the Court except that portion which rests upon detailed analysis of the Fifth Circuit’s opinion in Johnson v. Georgia Highway Express, Inc., 488 F. 2d 714 (1974), and the District Court decisions in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 66 F. R. D. 483 (WDNC 1975); Stanford Daily v. Zurcher, 64 F. R. D. 680 (ND Cal. 1974); and Davis v. County of Los Angeles, 8 EPD ¶9444 (CD Cal. 1974). See ante, at 91-93. The Court carefully examines those opinions, separating holding from dictum, much as a lower court would study our opinions -in order to be faithful to our guidance. The justification for this role reversal is that the Senate and House Committee Reports on the Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Awards Act of 1976 referred approvingly to Johnson, and the Senate Report alone referred to the three District *98Court opinions as having “correctly applied” Johnson. The Court resolves the difficulty that Johnson contradicts the three District Court opinions on the precise point at issue here by concluding in effect that the analysis in Johnson was dictum, whereas in the three District Court opinions it was a holding. Despite the fact that the House Report referred only to Johnson, and made no mention of the District Court cases, the Court “doubt[s] that Congress embraced this aspect of Johnson, for it pointed to the three District Court cases in which the factors are ‘correctly applied.’” Ante, at 92.
In my view Congress did no such thing. Congress is elected to enact statutes rather than point to cases, and its Members have better uses for their time than poring over District Court opinions. That the Court should refer to the citation of three District Court cases in a document issued by a single committee of a single house as the action of Congress displays the level of unreality that our unrestrained use of legislative history has attained. I am confident that only a small proportion of the Members of Congress read either one of the Committee Reports in question, even if (as is not always the case) the Reports happened to have been published before the vote; that very few of those who did read them set off for the nearest law library to check out what was actually said in the four cases at issue (or in the more than 50 other cases cited by the House and Senate Reports); and that no Member of Congress came to the judgment that the District Court cases would trump Johnson on the point at issue here because the latter was dictum. As anyone familiar with modern-day drafting of congressional committee reports is well aware, the references to the cases were inserted, at best by a committee staff member on his or her own initiative, and at worst by a committee staff member at the suggestion of a lawyer-lobbyist; and the purpose of those references was not primarily to inform the Members of Congress what the bill meant (for that end Johnson would not merely have been *99cited, but its 12 factors would have been described, which they were not), but rather to influence judicial construction. What a heady feeling it must be for a young staffer, to know that his or her citation of obscure district court cases can transform them into the law of the land, thereafter dutifully to be observed by the Supreme Court itself.
I decline to participate in this process. It is neither compatible with our judicial responsibility of assuring reasoned, consistent, and effective application of the statutes of the United States, nor conducive to a genuine effectuation of congressional intent, to give legislative force to each snippet of analysis, and even every case citation, in committee reports that are increasingly unreliable evidence of what the voting Members of Congress actually had in mind. By treating Johnson and the District Court trilogy as fully authoritative,. the Court today expands what I regard as our cases’ exces-' sive preoccupation with them — and with the 12-factor Johnson analysis in particular. See, e. g., Blum v. Stenson, 465 U. S. 886, 893-896, 900 (1984); Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U. S. 424, 429-432, 434-435 (1983). This expansion is all the more puzzling because I had thought that in the first Delaware Valley case, Pennsylvania v. Delaware Valley Citizens’ Council for Clean Air, 478 U. S. 546 (1986), we had acknowledged our emancipation from Johnson, see 478 U. S., at 563-565. Indeed, the plurality opinion in the second Delaware Valley case, Pennsylvania v. Delaware Valley Citizens’ Council for Clean Air, 483 U. S. 711, 723-724 (1987) (Delaware Valley II), discussed Johnson and the other three cases almost exclusively by way of refuting arguments made in reliance upon them in Justice Brennan’s separate opinion in Blum v. Stenson, supra, at 902-903. Moreover, the concurring opinion that formed the fifth vote for the judgment in Delaware Valley II did not discuss the four cases at all. 483 U. S., at 731-734 (O’Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). Except for the few passages to which I object, today’s opinion admirably follows our more *100recent approach of seeking to develop an interpretation of the statute that is reasonable, consistent, and faithful to its apparent purpose, rather than to achieve obedient adherence to cases cited in the committee reports. I therefore join the balance of the opinion.