Court Opinion

ID: 9421429
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:58:15.764917+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:30.122909
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
dissenting.
Insistence on establishment of the Court’s jurisdiction is too often treated, with slighting intent, as a “technicality.” In truth, due regard for the requirements of the conditions that alone give this Court power to review the judgment of the highest court of a State is a matter of deep importance to the working of our federalism. The admonition uttered a hundred years ago by Benjamin R. Curtis, one of the ablest Justices who ever sat on this Court, cannot be too often repeated: “Let it be remembered, also, — for just now we may be in some danger of forgetting it, — that questions of jurisdiction were questions of power as between the United States and the several States.” 2 Memoir of Curtis 340-341. The importance of keeping within the limits of federal jurisdiction was emphasized in the opinion of Mr. Justice Stone, for a unanimous Court, in Healy v. Ratta, 292 U. S. 263, 270: “Due regard for the rightful independence of state governments, which should actuate federal courts, requires that they scrupulously confine their own jurisdiction to the precise limits which the statute ['the action of Congress in conformity to the judiciary sections of the Constitution’] has defined.”
Prerequisites to the power of this Court to review a judgment of a state court are that a federal claim was *275properly before the state court and that the state court based its decision on that claim. If a state court judgment is rested on a non-federal ground, i. e., on relevant state law, this Court is constitutionally barred from reviewing it. While a State may not, under the guise of regulating its local procedure, strangle a federal claim so as to prevent it from coming before a state court, it has the undoubted power to prescribe appropriate procedure for bringing all questions for determination before its courts. Squeezing out of the record in this case all that can be squeezed, the most that the five pages of the Court’s opinion dealing with this threshold question can be said to demonstrate is that there is doubt whether or not the claim under the United States Constitution was properly presented to the California Supreme Court, according to its requirements.
Before this Court can find that a State — and the judgment of the Supreme Court of California expresses “the power of the State as a whole,” Rippey v. Texas, 193 U. S. 504, 509; Skiriotes v. Florida, 313 U. S. 69, 79—has violated the Constitution, it must be clear from the record that the state court has in fact passed on a federal question. As a safeguard against intrusion upon state power, it has been our practice when a fair doubt is raised whether a state court has in fact adjudicated a properly presented federal claim not to assume or presume that it has done so. The Court has not based its power to review on guess-work. It has remanded the case to the state court to enable it to make clear by appropriate certification that it has in fact rested its decision on rejection of a federal claim and has not reached its decision on an adequate state ground. Strict adherence to the jurisdictional requirement was insisted upon in Whitney v. California, the well-known civil liberties case, by a Court that included Justices Holmes and Brandéis, as mindful as any in protecting the liberties guaranteed by *276the Due Process Clause. Whitney v. California, 269 U. S. 530, 538; 274 U. S. 357. See also Honeyman v. Hanan, 300 U. S. 14; cf. Minnesota v. National Tea Co., 309 U. S. 551.
The procedure of making sure, through appropriate certification by a state court, that the federal question was in fact adjudicated, is a safeguard against infringement of powers that belong to the States and at the same time duly protects this Court’s jurisdiction to review denial of a federal claim by a state court, if in fact it becomes clear that there was such a denial. This may involve some delay in the final determination of a federal question. The price of such delay is small enough cost in the proper functioning of our federal system in one of its important aspects. This Court has a special responsibility to be particularly mindful of the respective boundaries between state and federal authority.
I would remand the case to the Supreme Court of California for its certification whether or not it did in fact pass on a claim properly before it under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.