Court Opinion

ID: 9497770
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:59:41.13102+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:24.542446
License: Public Domain

BRYSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the result.
I agree with the result reached by the court in this case, but not with the path the court follows to reach that result. In particular, I cannot agree with the court’s construction of the phrase “law that affects the provision of benefits by the Secretary to veterans or the dependents or survivors of veterans.” 38 U.S.C. § 511(a). I would construe that phrase to refer only to specific legal provisions that affect the provision of veterans’ benefits. The court, however, construes that phrase more broadly, to refer to any public law that contains some veterans’ benefit provisions.
The problem is that public laws, particularly in recent years, have often not been confined to a single subject. Some public laws run to hundreds of pages and deal with a myriad of different subjects. Sometimes the multitude of subjects touched upon in a single public law include veterans’ benefits. For example, the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, Pub.L. No. 105-178, 112 Stat. 107 (1998), runs to more than 400 pages. Among the various topics in that public law are three pages of provisions dealing with veterans’ benefits. Under the court’s definition, the entire Transportation Equity Act is a “law that affects the provision of benefits” for veterans.
The court’s construction of the phrase “law that affects the provision of benefits” as referring to an entire public law would appear to extend the jurisdiction of the BVA to a wide range of actions by the Secretary for which BVA appeals have never been considered appropriate. Consider, for example, the Veterans Health Care, Capital Asset, and Business Improvement Act of 2003, Pub.L. No. 108-*1367170, 117 Stat.2042. That public law contains provisions extending and increasing benefits to veterans in various classes, and thus it clearly qualifies as a public law that “affects the provision of benefits” to veterans as the court construes that language in 38 U.S.C. § 511. But that public law also contains provisions relating to non-benefit-related matters such as the construction of VA facilities and the promotion and appointment of certain VA employees. Congress plainly did not intend for disputes arising under the portions of that public law dealing with employment and construction to be subject to the jurisdiction of the BVA. Yet that would seem to be the result of the court’s construction of the phrase “law that affects the provision of benefits.”1
The court’s broad construction of section 511(a) is problematical because of section 511(b). Section 511(a) provides that the decision of the Secretary as to any question within its scope “shall be final and conclusive and may not be reviewed by any other official or by any court, whether by an action in the nature of mandamus or otherwise.” Section 511(b) contains only four exceptions to section 511(a)’s bar to review, one of which is the exception that permits review by the Veterans Court. The other exceptions deal with narrow subject matters: the review of Departmental rules and regulations in this court; suits in district court on claims related to federally provided insurance; and suits under chapter 37 of Title 38 relating to housing and small business loans. Those four exceptions do not include review by specialized tribunals such as the Merit Systems Protection Board, the agency’s Board of Contract Appeals, or the Court of Federal Claims. Thus, the court’s construction of section 511 would appear to lead to the conclusion that certain employment and contract matters would be reviewable by the BVA and the Veterans Court.
The court resolves the problem of the statutory conflict created by its construction of section 511 in favor of the statutes that assign jurisdiction over employment and contract matters to specialized tribunals. But the preferable construction of section 511 is one that does not create such a conflict in the first place. It is clear that Congress did not intend to create, or believe it was creating, such a conflict in 1970, when it adopted what is essentially the current language of section 511, see Pub.L. No. 91-376, 84 Stat. 787, 790 (1970), or in 1988 when it amended section 511 to provide for review of veterans’ benefits matters by the Veterans Court, see Pub.L. No. 100-687, 102 Stat. 4105 (1988). See H.R.Rep. No. 91-1166 (1970), reprinted in 1970 U.S.C.C.A.N. 3723, 3731 (“The restated section [now section 511] will make it perfectly clear that the Congress intends to preclude from judicial review all determinations with respect to noncontractual benefits provided for veterans and their dependents and survivors.”). Moreover, the court’s resolution of the “specialized tribunal” problem leaves another problem unaddressed. The court’s construction of *1368section 511 does not solve the broader problem of non-benefit-related matters that would not be committed under any circumstances to a specialized tribunal, but would be expected to be reviewed by a district court under the Administrative Procedure Act. As to such decisions arising under a public law that contains some veterans’ benefit provisions, the court’s approach would appear to render such non-benefit-related matters renewable, if at all, only in the BVA and the Veterans Court, a result that Congress surely did not intend. Yet to ensure that such non-benefit-related matters fall outside the jurisdiction of the BVA and the Veterans Court, one has to circle back to the position that section 511(a) applies only to disputes arising under particular legal provisions pertaining to benefits.
The best approach, in my view, is simply to construe “law’! in section 511 to refer to particular provisions of law, not to the disparate collection of legal provisions that may appear in a particular public law.2 Under this construction, the question whether the Board has jurisdiction over an appeal would turn on whether the statutory provision in question “affects the provision of benefits by the Secretary to veterans or the dependents or survivors of veterans,” i.e., whether the particular statutory provision relates to the substance or procedures of the veterans’ benefits system. In most cases that question will be easy to decide: Most of the statutes that pertain to the veterans’ benefits system address subjects such as the conditions for eligibility, the procedures to be followed in determining eligibility, and the amount of the benefits to be paid.
In this case, the connection between the certification of lawyers and the conferral of benefits on veterans is not so obvious. Nonetheless, in light of the agency’s longstanding practice of regulating the representation of veterans so as to ensure that the beneficiaries obtain and retain the benefits to which they are entitled, statutory provisions authorizing the certification and regulation of representatives of applicants for veterans’ benefits are properly regarded as laws “that affect[ ] the provision of benefits.” On that ground, I would hold that 38 U.S.C. § 5904(b) is such a law and that the Board of Veterans’ Appeals therefore has jurisdiction to hear appeals from the Secretary’s decisions under that statute.
*1369In Walters v. National Association of Radiation Survivors, 473 U.S. 305, 105 S.Ct. 3180, 87 L.Ed.2d 220 (1985), the Supreme Court reviewed the history of the veterans’ benefits system, with particular attention to the role of attorneys within that system. The Court explained that the system for administering benefits was designed to be managed “in a sufficiently informal way that there should be no need for the employment of an attorney to obtain the benefits to which a claimant was entitled, so that the claimant would receive the entirety of the award without having to divide it with a lawyer.” Id. at 321, 105 S.Ct. 3180. Section 5904(b), which governs the suspension or exclusion of agents and attorneys who have been certified to prepare, present, and prosecute claims for veterans’ benefits, has been a part of the veterans’ benefits system for many years. Along with the other subsections of section 5904, which govern certification (subsection (a)) and restrictions on fees charged by agents and attorneys (subsections (c) and (d)), subsection (b) has served as one of the means by which the agency has sought to ensure that veterans not be deprived of the benefits to which they are entitled. It is therefore properly considered a “law that affects the provision of benefits by the Secretary to veterans or the dependents or survivors of veterans.”
Both the construction of section 511 and the analysis of section 5904(b) that I have proposed are consistent with our prior decision in Cox v. West, 149 F.3d 1360 (Fed.Cir.1998). In that case, we upheld the ruling of the Veterans Court that 38 U.S.C. § 5904(d) is a law that affects the provision of veterans’ benefits and thus falls within 38 U.S.C. § 511(a). Id. at 1365. The specific provision at issue in Cox authorized the Secretary to withhold a portion of the past-due benefits owed to a claimant and to pay those withheld benefits to an attorney. Because section 5904(d) authorized the Secretary to make decisions that directly affected the amount of the benefits that the claimant received, the relationship between the statute and the claimant’s benefits was more direct in Cox than it is here. Nonetheless, the purpose of certification of attorneys is to ensure that claimants in the veterans’ benefits system are competently and honestly represented, to the end that they will receive the full measure of benefits to which they are entitled, without loss or reduction due to attorney incompetence or overreaching. Because the purpose underlying section 5904(b) is the same as the purpose underlying section 5904(d), it is fair to say that section 5904(b) is “a law that affects the provision of benefits” to veterans and their survivors and dependents. Thus, although I would not decide this case on the “public law” rationale employed by the majority, I agree that the writ of mandamus should issue.

. The 2003 statute is not unique in this regard. For example, the Veterans Benefits and Health Care Improvement Act of 2000, Pub.L. No. 106-419, 114 Stat. 1822, contains a number of provisions pertaining to veterans’ benefits, but also contains other matters plainly outside the contemplation of laws "that affect[ ] the provision of benefits,” such as provisions governing the pay of VA nurses and transactions involving the acquisition, disposition, and management of real property. See also, e.g., Veterans Millennium Health Care and Benefits Act, Pub.L. No. 106-117, 113 Stat. 1545 (1999) (statute contains provisions regarding veterans' benefits and provisions pertaining to a voluntary separation incentive program to reduce the level of employment in the Department of Veterans Affairs).

. The court refers to its "public law” construction as the "plain meaning” of section 511. I do not agree. It is certainly true the term "law” includes public laws, but that is not to say that only public laws are properly referred to as laws. For example, the statute that grants federal question jurisdiction to federal courts, 28 U.S.C. § 1331, prescribes the courts' jurisdiction as being based on the “Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States,” yet the term "laws” in that statute has not been limited to public laws. See Illinois v. City of Milwaukee, 406 U.S. 91, 99-100, 92 S.Ct. 1385, 31 L.Ed.2d 712 (1972) (holding that the "natural meaning” of the term “laws” includes federal common law as well as statutes). The court’s citations to the Constitution and Title 1 of the United States Code do not establish that a single statutory provision is not a "law.” Indeed, it is commonplace to refer to single statutory sections and subsections as "laws,” and not to reserve that designation exclusively for whole public laws. See, e.g., Gonzales v. United States, 275 F.3d 1340, 1343 (Fed.Cir.2001) ("section 654 [of Public Law 105-85] ... is a law conferring rights, privileges, or benefits' upon certain World War II veterans”); United States v. Dela Cruz, 358 F.3d 623, 625 (9th Cir.2004) ("Section 844(e) [of Title 18] is a law of general application”); Rayner v. Smirl, 873 F.2d 60, 65 (4th Cir.1989) ("Section 441 [of Title 45] clearly is a law 'relating to railroad safety' under § 434”). This is not to say that a statutory section or subsection is the only meaning of the term "law,” but simply that it cannot reasonably be claimed that the "plain meaning” of the term "law” is restricted to public laws.