Court Opinion

ID: 9486210
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:41:05.013915+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:34.991780
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
It is easily forgotten that, when Judge Kocoras entered the temporary restraining order, there was no prospect of any other agency or circumstance’s opening the doors of Chicago’s public schools. In fact, a new contract still had to be negotiated between the Teachers Union and the School Board. This turned out to be a difficult, laborious and time-consuming task, carried out in the shelter of Judge Kocoras’ decree. It may be easy in hindsight to find fault with the finer points of Judge Kocoras’ analysis or to scorn the link between the desegregation decree and the ability of the schools to operate. But I think Judge Kocoras acted in the finest tradition of the federal judiciary as, in effect, the agency of last resort in coming to the aid of the overwhelmingly minority public school 'population. At the time they were taken, Judge Kocoras’ actions were consented to and supported by all the actors involved in the controversy, including the Attorney General of Illinois, who is charged with enforcement of the school finance law.
There has been no finding to the effect, nor am I aware, that there was racial animus in any aspect of this school crisis. But it is a good bet that, if Chicago’s public school students were predominantly white, the financial crisis would never have reached a point requiring the intervention of the federal courts.
The majority opinion vacates the injunction ordered by Judge Kocoras because boarding up all of Chicago’s public schools raises “no federal issue.” Maj. op. at 672. In the majority’s view, the “dispute between the school board and the finance authority is entirely a matter of state and local law and politics.” Id.
Where there truly is no federal issue involved, federal courts should stay out of local politics. As is often the case, the federal court here stepped in after the political actors all but abdicated their responsibilities. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for example, has written that the “need for interventionist decisions” by judges “would be reduced significantly if elected officials shouldered their responsibility” for decisionmaking. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Inviting Judicial Activism: A Liberal or Conservative Technique, 15 Ga. L.Rev. 539, 550 (1981). She thus notes that the involvement of the federal courts in announcing a fall-blown constitutionalized abor- ' tion right may have unduly interfered with a political process that might have otherwise worked out the solution to its own problems. Leaving the matter to the- political actors “might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Speaking in a Judicial Voice, 67 N.Y.U.L.Rev. 1185, 1199 (1992).
As it turns out, the same proposition appears to be true here. Once the band-aid of federal court intervention was torn off, the political branches of government were forced to deal with their problems, to cleanse their wounds. Perhaps it’ is correct that, in order to preserve political capital and to allow local actors to solve their own problems, federal courts should be unobtrusive, see Richard A. Posner, The Federal Courts: Crisis and Reform ch. 7 (1985). But a court is clearly not permitted, waving this policy preference as a wand, to make a federal interest disappear.
Faced with the prospect of shuttered schools, Judge Kocoras, who is charged with . overseeing the Consent Decree entered into between .the Board of Education and the Justice Department, concluded that closing the schools would deny minority students .access to the special remedial programs established under the Consent Decree. These programs were established as a remedy for the fact that for decades Chicago’s public schools were, in effect, segregated, denying the city’s schoolchildren their right to equal protection under law. See Consent Decree, United States v. Board of Educ. of the City of Chicago (N.D.Ill. Sept. 24, 1980), App. 387.
In Judge Kocoras’ view, the maintenance of these programs was inextricably tied in with the core function of the schools. Closing the schools and therefore shutting down these, programs would violate federal law. Today’s majority reverses Judge Kocoras, *676insisting that none of this raises any question of federal law. Since the Civil War and-Reconstruction there has been very broad agreement that the federal courts have a central role in enforcing constitutional guarantees against state and local governments, especially' the guarantee of equal protection of the law. See Robert J. KaezorowsM, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, The Department of Justice and Civil Rights, ,1866-1876 (1985).
The consent decree entered in United States v. Board of Educ. of the City of Chicago is exactly such an effort. In order to guarantee that Chicago’s public school students — most of whom are black or Hispanic — receive the equal protection of the 'law to which the Fourteenth Amendment entitles them, the Chicago Board of Education agreed, after being sued by the Justice Department, to take affirmative steps to eradicate the persistent vestiges of past racial and ethnic segregation. These steps included running magnet schools, remedial programs and compensatory education.
Judge Kocoras concluded that closing the schools would interfere with the operation of these programs, which are “inextricably bound up” with the “core educational program.” App. 283. But the majority says that Judge Kocoras misunderstood the consent decree. According to the court, the consent decree assumes rather than requires the existence of schools in the first place. Padlocking the schools altogether, while inconsistent with the assumptions underlying the consent decree, does not violate its terms. The majority in effect finds that the consent decree contains an implicit term, telling the School Board that it does not need to do any of the things that the decree requires, so long as its reason for failing to comply does not in itself amount to an independent violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Maj. op. at 672-74.
This is inconsistent with the supremacy of federal law. Once a federal court orders that an action be taken to give effect to a constitutional right — and a city’s obligation to operate desegregated schools is as good an example as any — the failure to do so empowers the federal court to issue an injunction. If a 1950s-style segregated school system were ordered to desegregate, and it refused, balked or stalled, it would make no difference whether the school’s actions were driven by racial animus or a bona fide fiscal crisis.
The majority does have a point in suggesting that the relationship between the 13-year-old consent decree and Judge Kocoras’ injunction is an attenuated one. Perhaps it is too attenuated to support the exercise of federal authority over the machinations of state and local political processes. But because the court thought that the threatened injury to the city’s minority schoolchildren was irreparable, it needed to find only that they had a greater than negligible chance of succeeding on the merits. See Roland Machinery Co. v. Dresser Industries, 749 F.2d 380, 387 (7th Cir.1984); Developments in the Law, Injunctions, 78 Harv.L.Rev. 994, 1056 (1965) (“Clear evidence of irreparable injury should result in a less stringent requirement of certainty of victory.”).
This is a matter of judgment. The conclusion is not entirely obvious, and there is in my view at least a plausible argument to be made on Judge Kocoras’ side. Perhaps, if I were deciding this case in the first instance, I would conclude that the majority had the better of the argument. But that is a legal fine point. And if this case is to be governed by legal fine points, there may be in my view another dispositive issue — the absence of appellate jurisdiction.
The primary source of the federal courts of appeals’ jurisdiction is 28 U.S.C. § 1291, granting the courts of appeals the power to review final judgments entered by federal district courts. One of the statutory exceptions to the final judgment rule allows appellate courts to hear appeals from the entry of preliminary injunctions. 28 U.S.C. § 1292(a)(1). Appeals courts do not have jurisdiction, however, to review a district court’s decision to enter a temporary restraining order. See Weintraub v. Hanrahan, 435 F.2d 461 (7th Cir.1970).
From September 13 until October 3, Judge Kocoras’ order was undoubtedly a non-ap-pealable temporary restraining order. And so it remains, under Rule 65(b), if the party *677against whom it is directed consented to the extension. Ross v. Evans, 325 F.2d 160 (5th Cir.1963). See also Maj. op. at 671; Samson v. Murray, 415 U.S. 61, 86-87, 94 S.Ct. 937, 951, 39 L.Ed.2d 166 (1974).
This order enjoined the enforcement of Illinois state law, permitting the School Board to spend money already in its coffers, state law to the contrary notwithstanding. See App. at 285. It is thus the state against whom the district court’s order is directed. Here, the Attorney General (the only official under Illinois law empowered to represent the state and defend its laws, see Risser v. Thompson, 930 F.2d 549 (7th Cir.1991)) consented to the extension of the temporary restraining order. The state is enjoined from enforcing its law, and the state (which is therefore the real party in interest, even if not a “named” defendant) consents. App. 21.
The only “party” who did not consent to the extension of the temporary restraining order is the School Finance Authority. The question is therefore whether (as the majority clearly believes) the Finance Authority is a party against which the injunction is directed for the purposes of Rule 65(b). Under Illinois law, the Finance Authority’s enforcement authority is unclear. While there is some boiler-plate language giving it all necessary power to carry out its purposes, 105 ILCS § 5/34A-201, state law grants it only one specific enforcement power of any consequence in this context. Where the Finance Authority believes that the School Board is spending in violation of the balanced budget law, it is permitted to make a written finding that it can report to the “authority” charged by state law with enforcing any “penalty or liability.” 105 ILCS § 5/34A-201a. Illinois state law makes clear that this “authority” is the state’s Attorney General. Ill. Const., Art. V, § 15; 15 ILCS § 205/4. But here, the Attorney General consented to the extension of the temporary restraining order.
The temporary restraining order permitted the Board of Education to spend money that it already had, in violation of state law. Had the Board of Education done exactly that in the absence of the temporary restraining order, the only thing the Finance Authority could have done about it, under state law, was report its findings to the Attorney General. And the Finance Authority was not prevented, by virtue of this temporary restraining order, ■ from doing that. Thus, because the temporary restraining order did not prevent the ■ Finance Authority from doing anything, that it was otherwise empowered to do under state law, it is not a party against which the court’s order was directed. That is the central inquiry, and it is not affected by the fact that the Finance Authority has the general power to sue and be sued (when, for example, it enters into a contract) or by the fact that it has standing to defend the constitutionality of the Act (which implicates the very existence — not merely the enforcement powers — of the Authority).1 The temporary restraining order therefore remains a temporary restraining order (rather than a preliminary injunction), and we lack appellate jurisdiction.
While this may be a legal fine point, I see no reason for this court to leap over one legal fine point simply to seize upon another. Judge Kocoras advanced defensible reasons for having the federal courts intervene in this ease. Judges are not Kings. They have no plenary power simply to do what they think right. But neither are they robots. The law is a humanistic, not merely a scientific, discipline. See Martha C. Nussbaum, The Use and Abuse of Philosophy in Legal Education, 45 Stan.L.Rev. 1627, 1629 (1993); see generally Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (1990). In this case there was a plausible legal argument, and a compelling human one, for Judge Kocoras’ actions. The majority today rejects his legal conclusions. While I might in some quite different context be persuaded to agree, I am not here, for the *678reasons given, even certain of our jurisdiction. I therefore respectfully dissent.

. Nor is the fact that the Finance Authority has in the past hired private Counsel and sought a writ of mandamus persuasive on this point. None of the instances cited by the majority involves a situation where the Finance Authority has taken a position inconsistent with or con-traiy to the Attorney General’s litigating posture. I doubt that the Finance Authority is nonetheless empowered independently to enforce the state law in the face of the limitations provided by that law. See 105 ILCS § 5/34A-201a.