Court Opinion

ID: 9421530
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:58:46.0385+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:30.822685
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
whom Mr. Justice Clark joins,
dissenting.
This is one of those small cases that carry large issues, for it concerns the essence of our federalism — due regard for the constitutional distribution of power as be*326tween the Nation and the States, and more particularly the distribution of judicial power as between this Court and the judiciaries of the States.1
An ordinance of the City of Baxley, Georgia,2 provides that anyone who seeks to solicit members for any organization requiring the payment of dues shall first apply to the Mayor and Council of Baxley for a permit to carry on such solicitation. The ordinance further provides a detailed procedure for making the application, standards for granting the permit, the fee to be charged, and sanctions for failure to comply with the ordinance. Appellant was arrested for violation of the ordinance and was ordered to appear before the Mayor’s Court of the City. By a plea in abatement she attacked the ordinance as in conflict with provisions of the State and the United States Constitutions and with the National Labor Relations Act.3 Her plea was overruled, and the cause proceeded to trial. The undisputed evidence established *327that appellant was an employee of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, an organization that required dues of its members, that she was soliciting members for the union in Baxley, and that she had not applied for a permit as required by the city ordinance. Appellant was convicted and sentenced to pay a fine of $300 or serve 30 days in the city jail.
Appellant applied to the Superior Court of the county for a writ of certiorari, repeating the contentions she had made in her plea in abatement. The cause was tried de novo by the court without a jury and the judgment of the Mayor’s Court was affirmed.
On writ of error, the Georgia Court of Appeals reviewed the judgment of the Superior Court. It noted that appellant had made no effort to secure a permit and that her constitutional attack should have been made specifically against a particular section or sections of the ordinance and not against the ordinance as a whole. On this doctrine of Georgia appellate procedure it cited Anthony v. City of Atlanta, 66 Ga. App. 504, 505, 18 S. E. 2d 81-82, which in turn cited Glover v. City of Rome, 173 Ga. 239, 160 S. E. 249, and concluded that the issue of the constitutionality of the ordinance had not been properly raised. Accordingly, the Court of Appeals sustained the conviction. 94 Ga. App. 18, 93 S. E. 2d 375. The Supreme Court of Georgia denied appellant’s application for a writ of certiorari, and the case came here on appeal from the Court of Appeals of Georgia.
The jurisdictional basis for this appeal is 28 U. S. C. § 1257, which had its origin in the famous twenty-fifth section of the Act of September 24, 1789, 1 Stat. 73, 85. That seemingly technical procedural provision of the First Judiciary Act has served as one of the most nationalizing forces in our history. By that section, as construed in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, 1 Wheat. 304, strongly reinforced by Cohens v. Virginia, 6 Wheat. 264, the denial of *328a claim of a federal right in the final judgment of the highest available court of a State could be brought for review at the bar of this Court. This amenability of state action to the judicial arbitrament of the Nation’s Supreme Court has been recognized by leading historians as one of the shaping influences in the fusion of the States into a Nation. Naturally enough, vigorous efforts were made, both before and after the Civil War, to repeal § 25, but without avail. See Warren, Legislative and Judicial Attacks on the Supreme Court of the United States, A History of the Twenty-Fifth Section of the Judiciary Act, 47 Amer. L. Rev. 1, 161; H. R. Rep. No. 43, 21st Cong., 2d Sess.; Hart and Wechsler, “Note on the Attacks Upon the Jurisdiction,” The Federal Courts and the Federal System, 418. The power of this Court to review denials by state courts of federal claims has never been qualified.4
While the power to review the denial by a state court of a nonfrivolous claim under the United States Constitution has been centered in this Court, carrying with it the responsibility to see that the opportunity to assert such a claim be not thwarted by any local procedural device, equally important is observance by this Court of *329the wide discretion in the States to formulate their own procedures for bringing issues appropriately to the attention of their local courts, either in shaping litigation or by appeal. Such-methods and procedures may, when judged by the best standards of judicial administration, appear crude, awkward and even finicky or unnecessarily formal when judged in the light of modern emphasis on informality. But so long as the local procedure does not discriminate against the raising of federal claims and, in the particular case, has not been used to stifle a federal claim to prevent its eventual consideration here, this Court is powerless to deny to a State the right to have the kind of judicial system it chooses and to administer that system in its own way. It is of course for this Court to pass on the substantive sufficiency of a claim of federal right, First National Bank v. Anderson, 269 U. S. 341, 346, but if resort is had in the first instance to the state judiciary for the enforcement of a federal constitutional right, the State is not barred from subjecting the suit to the same procedures, nisi prius5 and appellate, that govern adjudication of all constitutional issues in that State. Edelman v. California, 344 U. S. 357; Parker v. Illinois, 333 U. S. 571. In Nickel v. Cole, 256 U. S. 222, 225, we said, “[W]hen as here there can be no pretence that the [state] Court adopted its view in order to evade a constitutional issue, and the case has been decided upon grounds *330that have no relation to any federal question, this Court accepts the decision whether right or wrong.”
The relevance of a state procedure requiring that constitutional issues be presented in their narrowest possible scope is confirmed by the practice of this Court. The Court has long insisted, certainly in precept, on rigorous requirements that must be fulfilled before it will pass on the constitutionality of legislation, on avoidance of such determinations even by strained statutory construction, and on keeping constitutional adjudication, when unavoidable, as narrow as circumstances will permit. See the classic statement of the unanimous Court in Liverpool, N. Y. & P. S. S. Co. v. Commissioners of Emigration, 113 U. S. 33, 39, and “a series of rules,” drawn from a long sequence of prior decisions by Mr. Justice Brandéis, in his well-known concurring opinion, frequently cited and always approvingly, in Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 297 U. S. 288, 346-348. Even though its action may result in the disadvantages and embarrassments of keeping open doubtful questions of constitutionality, this Court will consider only those very limited aspects of a statute that alone may affect the rights of a particular litigant before the Court. See Muskrat v. United States, 219 U. S. 346, 361-362; Massachusetts v. Mellon, 262 U. S. 447. A statute may be found invalid in some of its parts but valid in others, see Dorchy v. Kansas, 264 U. S. 286, 289-290; it may be valid at one time and not another, see Chastleton Corp. v. Sinclair, 264 U. S. 543, 547-548; it may be valid under one state of facts but not another, see Kansas City Southern R. Co. v. Anderson, 233 U. S. 325, 329-330; it may be valid as to one class of persons and invalid as to others, see New York ex rel. Hatch v. Reardon, 204 U. S. 152, 160-161. It is because the exercise of the right to declare a law unconstitutional is “the most important and delicate duty of this court,” and because that right “is not given to [the *331Court] ... as a body with revisory power over the action of Congress,” Muskrat v. United States, supra, at 361, nor, it may be added, over the action of the forty-eight States, that this Court has from the beginning demanded of litigants that they show in precisely what way and to what extent incursions have been made into their federally protected rights and rules have been developed designed to narrow as closely as possible the issues presented by such claims. Surely a state court is not to be denied the like right to protect itself from the necessity — sometimes even the temptation — of adjudicating overly broad claims of unconstitutionality. Surely it can insist that such claims be formulated under precise (even if, in our view, needlessly particularized) requirements and restricted to the limited issues that concrete and immediately pressing circumstances may raise.
An examination of the whole course of Georgia decisions leaves one with the clear conviction that the procedural rule applied by the Court of Appeals of Georgia in this case was intended to be responsive to the same problems that have influenced the important considerations of judicial policy governing the administration of this Court’s business. The cases relied upon by the Georgia court in this case are part of a long line of decisions holding a comprehensive, all-inclusive challenge to the constitutionality of a statute inadequate and requiring explicit particularity in pleadings in order to raise constitutional questions. Those cases rest essentially on a recognition of the gravity of judicial invalidation of legislation. See, e. g., Dade County v. State, 201 Ga. 241, 245, 39 S. E. 2d 473, 476-477. They require the pleader to allege the specific portion of the challenged legislation. Thus, allegations of unconstitutionality directed at a group of 16 sections of the Criminal Code, Rooks v. Tindall, 138 Ga. 863, 76 S. E. 2d 378; a single named “lengthy section” of a statute, Crapp v. State, 148 *332Ga. 150, 95 S. E. 2d 993; a single section of a city charter amendment, Olover v. City of Rome, 173 Ga. 239, 160 S. E. 249; a named Act of the General Assembly, Wright v. Cannon, 185 Ga. 363, 195 S. E. 2d 168; and a 5-section chapter of the Code, Richmond Concrete Products Co. v. Ward, 212 Ga. 773, 95 S. E. 2d 677, were held “too general” or “too indefinite” to raise constitutional questions because of their failure to define with particularity what portions offended claimed constitutional rights. The Georgia rule is designed to apply, within this touchy scope of constitutional litigation, the requirement of the Georgia Code, Ga. Code Ann., 1956, § 81-101, that pleadings shall “plainly, fully, and distinctly” set forth the pleader’s cause of action, see Richmond Concrete Products Co. v. Ward, supra, at 775, 95 S. E. 2d, at 679.
There is nothing frivolous or futile (though it may appear “formal”) about a rule insisting that parties specify with arithmetic particularity those provisions in a legislative enactment they would ask a court to strike down. This is so, because such exactitude helps to make concrete the plaintiffs’ relation to challenged provisions. First, it calls for closer reflection and greater responsibility on the part of one who challenges legislation, for, in formulating specific attacks against each provision for which an infirmity is claimed, the pleader is more likely to test his claims critically and to reconsider them carefully than he would be if he adopted a “scatter-shot” approach. Secondly, the opposing party, in responding to a particularized attack, is more likely to plead in such a way as to narrow or even eliminate constitutional issues, as where he admits that a specific challenged provision is invalid.6 Finally, where the parties identify particular *333language in a statute as allegedly violating a constitutional provision, the court will often be able to construe the words in such a way as to render them inoffensive. The ordinance involved in this case might, for example, have been held inapplicable to the type of organization to which appellant belongs had her objections been directed at the word “union” in § I; it might have been held to provide for the automatic granting of a permit upon registration had appellant’s objections been directed specifically at the standard set forth in § IV.7 Sophisticated as such a construction might appear, it would have entailed less astute reading than has been resorted to by this Court in its avoidance of constitutional adjudication.
Of course, even if the Georgia rule is intrinsically reasonable and thus entitled to respect by this Court, we must be sure that it has not been applied arbitrarily in the case before us. Appellant attacks a nine-section ordinance with nine charges of invalidity, several of which (although it is difficult to say precisely how many) involve federal claims. It may be — but it certainly is not clearly so — that with little expenditure of time and effort, and with little risk of misreading appellant’s charges, a court could determine exactly what it is about the Baxley ordinance that allegedly infringes upon appellant’s constitutional rights. But rules are not made solely for the easiest cases they govern. The fact that the reason for a rule does not clearly apply in a given situation does not eliminate the necessity for compliance with the rule. So long as a reasonable rule of state procedure is consistently applied, so long as it is not used as a means for evading vindication of federal rights, see Davis v. Wechsler, 263 U. S. 22, 24-25, it should not be refused applicability. There is no indication whatever in the case before us that *334the Georgia Court of Appeals applied this well-established rule of pleading arbitrarily or inadvisedly; this case cannot be said to stand out, among the many cases in which the rule has been applied, as a deviation from the norm.
The local procedural rule which controlled this case should not be disregarded by reason of a group of Georgia cases which, while recognizing and reaffirming the rule of pleading relied on by the Court of Appeals below, suggest a limited qualification. It appears that under special circumstances, where a generalized attack is made against a statute without reference to specific provisions, the court will inquire into the validity of the entire body of legislation challenged. The cases on which the Court relies as establishing this as the prevailing rule in Georgia strongly indicate that this approach will be used only where an allegation of unconstitutionality can be disposed of (one way or the other) relatively summarily and not where, as here, difficult issues are raised. In the only case cited by the Court in which the Georgia Supreme Court overturned a statute on the basis of generalized allegations, Atlantic Loan Co. v. Peterson, 181 Ga. 266, 182 S. E. 15, the result was “plainly apparent.” 181 Ga., at 274, 182 S. E., at 19. In the other cases cited, Miller v. Head, 186 Ga. 694, 198 S. E. 680; Stegall v. Southwest Georgia Regional Housing Authority, 197 Ga. 571, 30 S. E. 2d 196; Krasner v. Rutledge, 204 Ga. 380, 49 S. E. 2d 864, and Flynn v. State, 209 Ga. 519, 74 S. E. 2d 461, the court gave varying degrees of recognition to this approach, refusing altogether to apply it in Flynn, where the court declined to accept “the burden of examining the act section by section and sentence by sentence.” 209 Ga., at 522, 74 S. E. 2d, at 464. Certainly it cannot be said that the Court of Appeals was out of constitutional bounds in failing to bring the instant case within the purview of whatever exception can be said to have been *335spelled out by these cases or that it is for this Court to formulate exceptions to the valid Georgia rule of procedure.
The record before us presents not the remotest basis for attributing to the Georgia court any desire to limit the appellant in the fullest opportunity to raise claims of federal right or to prevent an adverse decision on such claims in the Georgia court from review by this Court. Consequently, this Court is left with no proper choice but to give effect to the rule of procedure on the basis of which this case was disposed of below. “Without any doubt it rests with each State to prescribe the jurisdiction of its appellate courts, the mode and time of invoking that jurisdiction, and the rules of practice to be applied in- its exercise; and the state-law and practice in this regard are no less applicable when Federal rights are in controversy than when the case turns entirely upon questions of local or general law. Callan v. Bransford, 139 U. S. 197; Brown v. Massachusetts, 144 U. S. 573; Jacobi v. Alabama, 187 U. S. 133; Hulbert v. Chicago, 202 U. S. 275, 281; Newman v. Gates, 204 U. S. 89; Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Co. v. McDonald, 214 U. S. 191, 195.” John v. Paullin, 231 U. S. 583, 585.
The appeal should be dismissed.
APPENDIX TO OPINION OF MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER.
Poetions of Appellant's Plea in Abatement.
“2’. Defendant alleges that the prosecution of said case should be abated upon the ground that said ordinance is unconstitutional and void for the reasons hereinafter stated.
“(a) Defendant shows that the ordinance with which she is charged to have violated shows on its face that it *336is repugnant to and violative of the 1st and 14th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States in that it places a condition precedent upon, and otherwise unlawfully restricts the defendant’s freedom of speech as well as freedom of the press and freedom of lawful assembly. Defendant shows that the right to engage in organizing labor unions is an inherent constitutional right consisting of soliciting members by pointing out to workers the advantage of belonging to labor unions, such solicitation being done by word of mouth, by pamphlets or other publications and by holding meetings of those desirous to be informed of the facts about labor unions. Defendant shows that such acts are restricted and limited by said ordinance so as to place a condition precedent, by way of the payment of a license fee, or the privilege of engaging in the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly.
“(b) Defendant shows that said ordinance is repugnant to and violative of Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, as amended, and tends to contravene said Act and the public policy of the United States as contained in said Act by establishing unwarranted conditions upon the right of defendant to participate in the labor activities secured by the National Labor Relations Act, as amended, and the public policy of the United States. Thus the ordinance which interferes with such rights is in direct conflict with superior Federal legislation and is therefore unconstitutional, null and void.
“(c) Defendant shows that said ordinance is not a valid ordinance in that it denies equal protection of the laws to defendant and others like defendant in that said ordinance, which requires the payment of large sums of money, is founded upon an unreasonable and invalid classification of persons which must pay the confiscatory fee which is set out in the ordinance. Said ordinance makes the payment of the fee conditioned upon the mere *337fact that a person receives remuneration for his efforts in soliciting membership in an organization. Such classification is not a reasonable classification for imposing the payment of a fee upon defendant and others similarly situated.
“(d) Defendant shows that said ordinance is invalid in that it shows on its face that it is a regulatory measure imposing a flat tax upon a privilege which is excessive in amount. The sums of money charged under said ordinance are of such amount as to be wholly unreasonable, confiscatory and prohibitory. The amounts of money charged in said ordinance are so large that it could not reasonably be paid by anyone desiring to organize any sort of organization and therefore exists solely to prevent and deprive defendant and others like defendant from organizing members in their organization and exercising rights previously herein set out. The ordinance shows on its face that it is patently a device intended to prevent organization within the city limits in behalf of labor unions. It is a well known fact this day and time that labor unions constitute the vast majority of organizations which send paid representatives into communities for the purpose of organizing and soliciting membership. The above purposes are illegal and improper and is a misuse and abuse of the law-making powers of the plaintiff city, but nevertheless will be successful in depriving defendant of her rights unless this court declares said ordinance null and void.
“(e) Defendant shows that said ordinance is an invalid regulating in that it leaves within the discretion of the Mayor and City Council, with no form of appeal or any objective or definitive standards, the refusal or granting of the license required.
“(f) Defendant shows that said ordinance is void in that the same is repugnant to and violative of Article 1, Section 1, paragraph 3 of the Constitution of the State *338of Georgia in that the same is not impartial but is unreasonable and arbitrary and contravenes said Section.
“(g) Defendant shows that said ordinance is unconstitutional and void as violative of Article 1, Section 1, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution of Georgia in that defendant is deprived of her liberty and property without due process of law.
“(h) Defendant shows that said ordinance is not a valid ordinance enacted for any legitimate purpose to benefit the citizens of Baxley, Georgia, but that said ordinance on its face shows that it is unreasonable, confiscatory, prohibitory and discriminatory, and that it exists solely for the purpose of depriving and denying defendant and others from engaging in a lawful occupation and that said ordinance is for the purpose of preventing the organization of labor unions within the city limits of Baxley, Georgia.
“(i) Defendant avers that said ordinance is patently void in that the same is a misuse and abuse of the police power of the City of Baxley, Georgia, in an effort to deprive defendant and others like defendant of their rights herein referred to through the subterfuge of a city ordinance.
“3. Defendant alleges that because of the aforesaid reasons said ordinance is unconstitutional and void, and should be so declared by the court, and the action against defendant for violation thereof abated.”

 The peculiar demands made upon the judiciary by a federal system such as ours were recently indicated by the Chief Justice of Australia, Sir Owen Dixon:
“ [Federalism is a form of government the nature of which is seldom adequately understood in all its bearings by those whose fortune it is to live under a unitary system. The problems of federalism and the considerations governing their solution assume a different aspect to those whose lives are spent under the operation of a federal Constitution, particularly if by education, practice and study they have been brought to think about the constitutional conceptions and modes of reasoning which belong to federalism as commonplace and familiar ideas. A unitary system presents no analogies and indeed, on the contrary, it forms a background against which many of the conceptions and distinctions inherent in federalism must strike the mind as strange and exotic refinements.” O’Sullivan v. Noarlunga Meat Ltd., 94 C. L. R. 367, 375 (1956).

 The ordinance is set forth in full in the margin of the opinion of the Court in this case, ante, p. 314.

 The relevant portions of appellant’s plea in abatement are set forth in an Appendix to this opinion, p. 335, infra.

 It was not enlarged until 1914, 38 Stat. 790, now 28 U. S. C. § 1257 (3). It had been assumed that state courts would not unduly invoke a federal right to cut down state authority. But judicial attitudes on the part of state courts toward modern social legislation led Congress to establish a new principle of appellate control over state courts by conferring on this Court jurisdiction to review judgments by the highest court of a State upholding as well as denying federal rights.
More immediately relevant is the fact that, despite the centralizing tendency generated by the outcome of the Civil War, this Court rejected a vigorous drive to extend the scope of our review so as to cover all questions in the record, even those^of state concern, where the case is properly here on denial of some federal claim. This attempted extension was rejected as a “radical and hazardous change of a policy vital in its essential nature to the independence of the State courts . . . .” Murdock v. Memphis, 20 Wall. 590, 630.

 “While it is true that a substantive federal right or defense duly asserted cannot be lessened or destroyed by a state rule of practice, yet the claim of the plaintiff in error to a federal right not having been asserted at a time and in a manner calling for the consideration of it by the state Supreme Court under its established system of practice and pleading, the refusal of the trial court and of the Supreme Court to admit the testimony tendered in support of such claim is not a denial of a federal right which this court can review, Baldwin v. Kansas, 129 U. S. 52, Oxley Stave Co. v. Butler County, 166 U. S. 648 . . . .” Atlantic Coast Line R. Co. v. Mims, 242 U. S. 532, 536-537.

 One of the most vulnerable provisions of this ordinance, the drastically high license fee, was taken out of controversy in this suit by the respondent’s admission of its invalidity. It is not out of question that more specific pleading might have drawn similar admissions as to other allegedly objectionable portions of the ordinance.

 Thus, it is an allowable assumption that the Georgia court might construe § VI so as to make it provide that a person in appellant’s situation need only apply and pay a fee in order to obtain the permit.