Court Opinion

ID: 9720573
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 08:36:35.81249+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:19.618460
License: Public Domain

PEDERSON, Justice
(on petition for rehearing).
Even though I agree with petitioners, Benson and Amicus Curiae, when they say *119that the dissenting Justices overlooked or misapprehended the law, I join in denying the petitions for rehearing for the reason that no productive purpose would be accomplished thereby.
The opinion which I authored and which was approved by a plurality also, however, overlooked or misapprehended the law in two specific respects. The plurality opinion quoted from State ex rel. Olson v. Maxwell, 259 N.W.2d 621, 629 (N.D.1977), leaving, apparently, an inference that the majority of this court intended that the Workmen’s Compensation Bureau pay benefits to Benson regardless of the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of the statute. It was not so intended.
Secondly, in commenting upon this court’s test of the statute’s validity under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the plurality opinion wrongfully stated: “The substantive due-process test would be inappropriate for that review.” Although Justice Vogel, writing for a unanimous court in Johnson v. Hassett, 217 N.W.2d 771, 775 (N.D.1974), said that since 1937 the United States Supreme Court has rarely declared state law unconstitutional on substantive due-process grounds, he pointed out that a modification of this hands-off attitude is evident, and cited several cases and “commentators who have noted a remarkable resemblance between the ‘old substantive due process’ and the ‘new equal protection.’ ” United States Supreme Court watchers have continued to find strong indications that the Justices do not always apply only the traditional rational-basis standard or the strict judicial-scrutiny standard. See recent commentaries by Thomas F. Lambert, Jr., in 35 ATLA Law Journal 132 (1974), Kenneth L. Karst in 91 Harvard L.Rev. 1 (1977), and John Hart Ely in 92 Harvard L.Rev. 5 (1978).
Whether the United States Supreme Court has or has not resurrected a form of the old substantive due-process test, by that or any other name, it is nevertheless obvious that federal courts at the circuit and district level, in practically all circuits, do not restrict their reviewing function artificially and do measure constitutionality under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, not by whim or caprice, but by a test in the nature of substantive due process. See Jeffries v. Turkey Run Consolidated School District, 492 F.2d 1 (7th Cir.1974), and numerous decisions relying thereon.
A substantial federal question is involved.