Court Opinion

ID: 9472288
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:55:26.05346+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:50.880711
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc.
At a time when the very large number of federal court of appeals decisions being *1187issued every year (in excess of 10,000, of which about half are published opinions) makes it difficult for the Supreme Court to resolve all of the conflicts between circuits that ought to be resolved, we should hesitate before creating such a conflict. I do not mean that we should surrender our convictions and give a monopoly of court of appeals lawmaking to whatever circuit is, by the luck of the draw, first presented with an issue. But if the issue is not momentous, and its resolution by the previous circuit is defensible, if not necessarily certainly correct, then we ought either defer to its decision and avoid creating a conflict or at least hear the matter en banc before creating a conflict. And if, as in this case, the first two circuits to consider the question have reached the same result, the case for deference or at least for en banc consideration is strengthened.
As the panel opinion explains, 7 U.S.C. § 1981a authorizes the Farmers Home Administration to grant relief to farmers who owe it money, in particular relief from foreclosure. The question on which the panel differs with the only other circuits to have considered it is whether the statute creates by implication a duty to notify a farmer, before foreclosing on his farm, that he can apply for relief under the statute. The Eighth Circuit held that it does, Allison v. Block, 723 F.2d 631, 634-36 (8th Cir.1983), and the Tenth Circuit has followed the Eighth. See Matzke v. Block, 732 F.2d 799, 802 (10th Cir.1984). The conclusion of these courts is plausible, though not inevitable. Even without the light cast by the legislative history reviewed in the Eighth. Circuit’s opinion, it seems apparent that the object of the statute is unlikely to be attained if farmers are not told about the statute when they receive their notices of foreclosure. The Eighth and Tenth Circuits did not hold that every time Congress passes a statute the enforcing agency must send out notices to all the intended beneficiaries. That would be an extreme position. But since the Farmers Home Administration has to communicate with those beneficiaries anyway in order to tell them it is about to foreclose, it ought to avoid misleading them, and therefore it ought to add that the statute gives them an avenue of relief. It is at least plausible to infer that the enacting Congress meant to require the Administration to give such notice in these special circumstances.
It is not a compelling reply to this argument that everyone is presumed to know the contents of statutes. This is a legal fiction, and for more than 200 years we have been told that the proper office of legal fictions is to prevent, rather than to create, injustices. See 3 Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 43 (1768). It would not be much consolation to a farmer whose farm had been foreclosed without his knowing about the relief he might have gotten under section 1981a that he ought to have studied the United States Code more carefully; it is the kind of response that breeds popular disrespect for law. There ought to be a better reason for turning down his claim, such as the administrative burden to the government. But there does not seem to be any such burden. All that the approach of the other circuits requires the government to do is to add a sentence to the notice of foreclosure. The panel opinion of this circuit acknowledges that the burden is slight; the government’s brief makes no contrary claim.
In rejecting the approach of the other circuits, the panel cites cases such as Federal Crop Insurance Corp. v. Merrill, 332 U.S. 380, 68 S.Ct. 1, 92 L.Ed. 10 (1947), which hold that the government cannot be estopped by its agents to assert its statutory rights. But the question here is what those rights are. If Congress in section 1981a wanted to make the Farmers Home Administration notify farmers of their rights under the section, then no one is asking that the Administration be estopped to assert its right not to notify them; it has no such right.
As is often true in matters of statutory interpretation, it is not certain what Congress intended. Maybe — though there is no indication of this — it wanted to minimize the expense of the program by keeping many of the intended beneficiaries in the *1188dark, or at least by letting sleeping dogs lie. Or maybe, while desiring that the administrators of the program notify the program’s intended beneficiaries, Congress did not want to place them under a legal duty to do so. This reading is consistent with the fact that the statute does not impose such a duty in so many words. Yet we cannot draw a confident inference that Congress did not want to impose such a duty from the fact that it did not impose it expressly. Legislators cannot foresee and solve in advance all the problems that will arise in the.practical administration of the statutes they enact. The judicial duty of statutory interpretation is not a duty merely to read; it is a duty to help the legislature achieve the aims that can reasonably be inferred from the statutory design, and it requires us to pay attention to the spirit as well as the letter of the statute.
To repeat an earlier qualification, I am not suggesting that every time Congress passes a statute those charged with administering it must send written notice of its contents to all the intended beneficaries. The question before us is more particular than that; it is not unfairly stated as whether Congress meant to authorize the Farmers Home Administration to hide the existence of the newly enacted section 1981a by omitting from the notice of foreclosure all reference to the procedure by which the recipient of the notice might be able to prevent foreclosure. Maybe this is what Congress did mean to do but the contrary interpretation of the statute by the Eighth and Tenth Circuits is neither so clearly mistaken nor so far-reaching in its consequences that we ought to indulge our own views and reject theirs without going en banc, and by rejecting create another intercircuit conflict. Although the issue is not an earthshaking one, it is not a happy situation to have a rule that entitles farmers in the states of the Eighth and Tenth Circuits to notice of their rights under section 1981a, but not farmers in the states of the Seventh Circuit. I am not sure that even the government comes out much ahead, since now it must decide whether to send different notices in different parts of the nation. Of course whatever we do the government might decide to keep litigating the issue in the remaining circuits; but if we joined the Eighth and Tenth Circuits it might decide to throw in the towel. Indeed, I hope the government does so now, by heeding the panel’s suggestion that it comply throughout the nation with those circuits’ ruling. But it need not; and lacking confidence that it will I respectfully dissent from the decision not to hear this case before the full court.