Court Opinion

ID: 9480627
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:53:48.156573+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:48.596851
License: Public Domain

ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the judgment, with whom McMILLIAN, Circuit Judge, joins.
I fully agree with Judge Heaney’s persuasive dissenting opinion with respect to a private right of action for farmer-borrowers under the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987. I would nevertheless affirm this judgment, on the ground that the Anti-Injunction Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2283, deprived the District Court of jurisdiction to entertain this suit for an injunction against a proceeding pending in a state court. Accordingly, I concur in the result reached by the Court en banc, which is to affirm.
According to the dissenting opinion, the Anti-Injunction Act is not a bar when “an Act of Congress, clearly creating a federal right or remedy enforceable in a federal court of equity, could be given its intended scope only by the stay of a state court proceeding.” Mitchum v. Foster, 407 U.S. 225, 238, 92 S.Ct. 2151, 2160, 32 L.Ed.2d 705 (1972) (emphasis added), quoted by the dissent, post pp. 1192-1193. I agree that this is the correct standard. I cannot agree that it is met in this case. The Zajacs were completely free to set up, by way of defense to the state-court foreclosure proceeding, their rights to an independent appraisal under the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987. This is true though during the foreclosure proceeding, and indeed for almost a month after judgment had been entered against them, their rights under the Act were uncertain. The Technical Corrections Act of 1988 — retroactively amending the 1987 Act to accord with the Zajacs’ interpretation that it required an independent appraisal when restructuring is proposed — was approved by Congress and signed by the President in late August *11841988. At that time, the Zajacs’ appeal of foreclosure was still pending before the North Dakota Supreme Court. This federal defense, if ultimately rejected by the state courts, could have been vindicated by the Supreme Court of the United States on appeal from the Supreme Court of North Dakota. (The remedy now would be by certiorari, rather than by appeal, because most of the Supreme Court’s mandatory jurisdiction has been repealed, but the point remains that a federal court would be available to vindicate this federal right, if the state courts should disregard it.) It therefore cannot be said that the only way for the Zajacs’ federal statutory rights to be enforced was by suit for injunction in a federal district court. The state courts are open to consider, and in fact are obligated under the Supremacy Clause to consider, assertions of federal statutory right, whether they arise as part of someone’s claim or as part of a defense.
The Anti-Injunction Act embodies a fundamental policy of federalism. It is a limitation on the jurisdiction of the federal courts, and one that should be scrupulously observed. Exceptions to the Act should be narrowly construed, and doubts should be resolved in favor of applying it. Atlantic Coast Line R.R. v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, 398 U.S. 281, 90 S.Ct. 1739, 26 L.Ed.2d 234 (1970). On this basis, I would affirm the District Court’s dismissal of this case.