Court Opinion

ID: 9420913
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:56:18.831522+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:27.576192
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
whom Mr. Justice Black joins, dissenting.
Three Courts of Appeals have decided that under the Administrative Procedure Act an alien against whom a deportation order is outstanding may challenge the validity of that order by asking for a declaratory judg*238ment. Since 1946, so they held, he has not been restricted to habeas corpus for ,the assertion of his rights, and therefore has not needed to wait till he is arrested for deportation. The careful opinions of Judge Goodrich for the Third Circuit in United States ex rel.Trinler v. Carusi, 166 F. 2d 457, of Judge Bazelon for the District of Columbia Circuit in Kristensen v. McGrath, 86 U. S. App. D. C. 48, 179 F. 2d 796, and of Judge McAllister for the Sixth Circuit in Prince v. Commissioner, 185 F. 2d 578, make it abundantly clear why the Administrative Procedure Act should be treated as a far-reaching remedial measure, affording ready access to courts for those who claim that the administrative process, once it has come to rest, has disregarded judicially enforceable rights. The legislative materials concerning the Administrative Procedure Act— the reports of Committees and especially the authoritative elucidation of the measure by Chairman McCarran— impressively support the direction of thought which underlies the decisions of the three Courts of Appeals. It is appropriate to say that in disagreeing with these decisions, this Court is aware that “the broadly remedial purposes of the Act counsel a judicial attitude of hospitality towards the claim that § 10 greatly expanded the availability of judicial review.” The Court is inhibited from yielding to this “attitude of hospitality” because the only way in which a deportation order may be challenged under the existing Immigration Act is habeas corpus, and because the scope of inquiry on habeas corpus is what it is. The Court concludes that this limited scope of inquiry brings the Immigration Act within the exception to the provision authorizing an “action for a declaratory judgment” under § 10 (b), in that the Immigration Act is one of the statutes that “preclude judicial review.” 60 Stat. 243, 5 U. S. C. § 1009. In short, the Court gives the phrase “judicial review” in § 10 a technical *239content and thereby disregards the vital fact that although § 19 of the Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874, 889, as amended in 1940, 54 Stat. 1238, 670, 671, makes the decisions of the Attorney General “'final,” they are not finally final. As the hundreds of cases in the lower courts demonstrate, the Attorney General's actions are voluminously challenged and frequently set aside. No doubt the respect accorded to his findings is much more extensive than that accorded to findings of other agencies, or, to put it technically, “the scope of inquiry” is more limited. But the decisive fact is that the findings of the Attorney General are subject to challenge in the courts and from time to time are upset, whatever the formulas may be by which what he has finally done is undone.
If anything is plain in the legislative history of the Administrative Procedure Act it is that the Congress was not concerned with formularies when it referred to statutes which “preclude judicial review.” Senator McCarran was closely questioned about this matter and he had to satisfy Senators as to the very restricted meaning of this exception. He was not talking about “review” in any technical sense. He was talking about the opportunity to go into court and question what an administrative body had done. And he referred to those rare cases when “a statute denies resort to the court.” The bill, he said, “would not set aside such statute.” And then he repeated in a paraphrase what he had meant — a denial of “resort to the court” — in loose lawyers’ language: “If a statute denies the right of review, the bill does not interfere with the statute.” S. Doc. No. 248, 79th Cong., 2d Sess. 319. He had already made clear what his statement, “the bill does not interfere with the statute,” meant by pointing out that the exception to ready access to the courts was limited to a “law enacted by statute by the Congress of the United States, grant*240ing a review or denying a review .... We were not setting ourselves up to abrogate acts of Congress.” Id., at 311.
To allow a proceeding for a declaratory judgment to test the same issues that are open on habeas corpus is to abrogate no Act of Congress. It is, rather, to adopt, as between two permissible constructions of the Administrative Procedure Act, the one that evinces “a judicial attitude of hospitality.” The Court shrinks from such a construction, with obvious reluctance, because it thinks it cannot adopt it without subjecting an order of deportation to new and unlimited judicial scrutiny. Surely this is a needless fear. A declaratory judgment action under § 10 (b) can be limited — as it should be — to the scope of review appropriate to the extraordinary remedy of habeas corpus. The. Administrative Procedure Act is not to be construed, and it is easy not to construe it, so as to modify the Immigration Act and to allow courts to examine what the Attorney General has done beyond those substantive limits to which habeas corpus is now confined. But it is equally easy, and therefore I believe compelling, to construe the Administrative Procedure Act so as to loosen up the means by which the scrutiny provided for by the Immigration Act may be undertaken, to the extent that the technical conditions for habeas corpus, namely that a person must be in physical custody, can be dispensed with where a claim, capable of being vindicated through habeas corpus, is found.
The point is legally narrow but practically important. It means that one against whom a deportation order is outstanding but not executed may at once move, by means of a declaratory judgment, to challenge the administrative process insofar as the substantive law pertaining to deportation permits challenge. Of course Congress may now explicitly afford this relief. It may *241do so without opening the sluices of “review” in deportation cases. But it has already enabled us to do so under the Administrative Procedure Act. I think the Act is sufficiently supple not to require further legislation. The three opinions in the Courts of Appeals, to which reference has already been made, elaborate the grounds on which I would sustain the jurisdiction of the District Court.