Court Opinion

ID: 9426712
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:45.75845+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:02.626169
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Brennan,
with whom Mr. Justice Marshall joins, dissenting.
I dissent. My earlier dissent in Huffman v. Pursue, Ltd., 420 U. S. 592, 613-618 (1975), details the grounds for my disagreement with the Court’s extension of Younger principles to any state civil proceedings, including the form they take in Huffman and the instant case, and no purpose would be served in restating those reasons here. I repeat, however, my strong disagreement with the process begun in Huffman, carried to the extreme in last Term’s Paul v. Davis, 424 U. S. 693 *342(1976), and furthered today, of stripping all meaningful content from 42 U. S. C. § 1983. For, as I have said before: “Even if the extension of Younger v. Harris to pending state civil proceedings can be appropriate in any case . . . it is plainly improper in the case of an action by a federal plaintiff, as in this case, grounded upon 42 U. S. C. § 1983,” 420 U. S., at 616. Congress created this cause of action over a century ago, and at the same time expressly charged the federal judicial system with responsibility for the vindication and enforcement of federal rights under it against unconstitutional action under color of state law “whether that action be executive, legislative, or judicial,” Mitchum v. Foster, 407 U. S. 225, 240 (1972) (emphasis in original). In congressional contemplation, the pendency of state civil proceedings was to be wholly irrelevant. “The very purpose of § 1983 was to interpose the federal courts between the States and the people, as guardians of the people’s federal rights . . . .” Id., at 242. “Section 1983 opened the federal courts to private citizens, offering a uniquely federal remedy against incursions under the claimed authority of state law upon rights secured by the Constitution and laws of the Nation.” Id., at 239. That statute, and the Judiciary Act of 1875, 18 Stat. 470, which granted the federal courts general federal-question jurisdiction, completely altered Congress’ pre-Civil War policy of relying on state courts to vindicate rights arising under the Constitution and federal laws. These statutes constituted the lower federal courts “ 'the primary and powerful reliances for vindicating every right given by the Constitution, the laws, and treaties of the United States.’ ” Steffel v. Thompson, 415 U. S. 452, 464 (1974) (emphasis in original).
“In thus expanding federal judicial power, Congress imposed the duty upon all levels of the federal judiciary to give due respect to a suitor’s choice of a federal forum for the hearing and decision of his federal constitutional claims. Plainly, *343escape from that duty is not permissible merely because state courts also have the solemn responsibility, equally with the federal courts, '. . . to guard, enforce, and protect every right granted or secured by the Constitution of the United States.' . . . 'We yet like to believe that wherever the Federal courts sit, human rights under the Federal Constitution are always a proper subject for adjudication, and that we have not the right to decline the exercise of that jurisdiction simply because the rights asserted may be adjudicated in some other forum. . . .' ” Zwickler v. Koota, 389 U. S. 241, 248 (1967). This is true notwithstanding the possibility of review by this Court of state decisions, for “even when available by appeal rather than only by discretionary writ of certiorari, [that possibility] is an inadequate substitute for the initial District Court determination . . . to which the litigant is entitled in the federal courts.” England v. Louisiana State Bd. of Medical Examiners, 375 U. S. 411, 416 (1964).
In requiring the District Court to eject the federal plaintiff from the federal courthouse and to force him to seek vindication of his federal rights in pending state proceedings, the Court effectively cripples the congressional scheme enacted in § 1983. The crystal clarity of the congressional decision and purpose in adopting § 1983, and the unbroken line of this Court’s cases enforcing that decision, expose Huffman and today’s decision as deliberate and conscious floutings of a decision Congress was constitutionally empowered to make. It stands the § 1983 remedy on its head to deny the § 1983 plaintiff access to the federal forum because of the pendency of state civil proceedings where Congress intended that the district court should entertain his suit without regard to the pendency of the state suit. Rather than furthering principles of comity and our federalism, forced federal abdication in this context undercuts one of the chief values of federalism— the protection and vindication of important and overriding *344federal civil rights, which Congress, in § 1983 and the Judiciary Act of 1875, ordained should be a primary responsibility of the federal courts.
Mitchum v. Foster, supra, buttresses this conclusion. Mitchum held that § 1983 comes within the “expressly authorized” exception of 28 U. S. C. § 2283 so as to permit a federal district court in a § 1983 suit to stay a proceeding in a state court. The process begun in Huffman and furthered today of cutting back the remedies available in federal court under § 1983 plainly reintroduces much of the rigidity of § 2283, thus realizing the prophecy that if Younger were extended to civil cases, “the significance of Mitchum for those seeking relief from state civil proceedings would largely be destroyed, and the recognition of section 1983 as an exception to the Anti-Injunction Statute would have been a Pyrrhic victory.” The Supreme Court, 1971 Term, 86 Harv. L. Rev. 50, 217-218 (1972).
Today’s decision extends Huffman, which labeled the state nuisance proceeding “in important respects . . . more akin to a criminal prosecution than are most civil cases.” 420 U. S., at 604., By contrast the underlying suits in the New York courts here were collection suits typically involving small loans, and usually terminating in default judgments. Further, whereas in Huffman state officials were parties in the state-court suit, here those suits are between purely private parties. Whatever the importance of the State’s direct interest in Huffman in closing theaters exhibiting alleged obscene films, one must strain hard to discover any comparable state interest here in having federal rights adjudicated in a state rather than a federal forum. Thus Huffman’s “quasi-criminal” rationale and today’s reliance on state “contempt power” are revealed to be only covers for the ultimate goal of denying § 1983 plaintiffs the federal forum in any case, civil or criminal, when a pending state proceeding may hear the *345federal plaintiff’s federal claims.* This is nothing less than plain refusal to enforce the congressional direction, and for all practical purposes reduces Mitchum v. Foster to an empty shell.
Moreover, a requirement that the § 1983 plaintiff present his constitutional challenge in a suit between purely private parties pending in a state court may not be viewed as an unmixed blessing by the States. When Younger v. Harris, 401 U. S. 37 (1971), was decided, purely private state-court suits were seen as posing entirely different considerations from criminal prosecutions. Id., at 55, and n. 2 (Stewart, J., concurring). Pending state criminal proceedings have always been viewed as paradigm cases involving paramount state interests. Huffman, 420 U. S., at 613-614 (Brennan, J., dissenting). But remitting the decision of the constitutionality of state statutes to state civil proceedings between purely private parties may actually run counter to state interests. If the State may not be heard in the state civil case, defense of the constitutionality of its statute would be solely in the hands of a party having neither the State’s resources, expertise, nor governmental interest in sustaining the validity of the statute. A dilemma would be posed even for officials of a State like New York having procedures that permit, N. Y. Civ. Prac. Law § 1012 (b) (McKinney 1976), and in some cases require, N. Y. Exec. Law § 71 (McKinney 1972), state intervention in suits raising constitutional challenges to state statutes. They must choose whether to intervene in countless private lawsuits brought all over the State implicating the constitutionality of state statutes, or not to intervene and risk adverse decisions having effects far beyond the interests of the particular private *346parties. By contrast, a § 1983 suit in federal court necessarily names the State or its officials as defendants, and the litigation focuses squarely on the issue of the validity of the statute, with the State defending its own interest directly.
Perhaps the process of eviscerating § 1983 should not come as a surprise. This Court in a series of decisions in other contexts has shaped the doctrines of jurisdiction, justiciability, and remedy so as increasingly to bar the federal courthouse door to litigants with substantial federal claims. See Rizzo v. Goode, 423 U. S. 362 (1976); Simon v. Eastern Ky. Welfare Rights Org., 426 U. S. 26 (1976); Warth v. Seldin, 422 U. S. 490 (1975); O’Shea v. Littleton, 414 U. S. 488 (1974). The determination to keep § 1983 litigants out of the federal courthouse if they can be remitted to a state court, reflected not only in Huffman and today’s decision but in other decisions, e. g., Hicks v. Miranda, 422 U. S. 332 (1975), hardly serves the values of federalism, any more than did last Term’s decisions that so circumscribed the centuries-old remedy of habeas corpus as to weaken drastically the federal courts’ ability to safeguard individuals from unconstitutional imprisonment. Stone v. Powell, 428 U. S. 465 (1976); Francis v. Henderson, 425 U. S. 536 (1976).
These decisions have in common that they have been rendered in the name of federalism. But they have given this great concept a distorted and disturbing meaning. Under the banner of vague, undefined notions of equity, comity, and federalism, the Court has embarked upon the dangerous course of condoning both isolated, Paul v. Davis, 424 U. S. 693 (1976), and systematic, Rizzo v. Goode, supra, violations of civil liberties. Such decisions hardly bespeak a true concern for equity. Nor do they properly reflect the nature of our federalism. “Adopting the premise that state courts can be trusted to safeguard individual rights, the Supreme Court has gone on to limit the protective role of the federal judiciary. But in so doing it has forgotten that one of the strengths of our federal *347system is that it provides a double source of protection for the rights of our citizens. Federalism is not served when the federal half of that protection is crippled.” Brennan, State Constitutions and the Protection of Individual Rights, 90 Harv. L. Rev. 489, 502-503 (1977). I dissent.

I suspect that the purported disclaimer that “[a]s we did in Huffman, we save for another day the question of ‘the applicability of Younger to all civil litigation . . . ,' " ante, at 336 n. 13, is tongue in cheek, and that “save” in today’s disclaimer is a signal that merely the formal announcement is being postponed.