Court Opinion

ID: 9476882
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:08:05.732438+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:33.897093
License: Public Domain

LEVIN H. CAMPBELL, Chief Judge
(dissenting En Banc).
I cannot .agree with those of my colleagues who believe that the Massachusetts district court had authority, under its rule-making powers, to adopt PF 15.1 The provision is, in my view, a substantive innovation. Much of my reasoning is set out in my dissent found in the panel disposition of this case, see pages 658-64, supra. I rely on, and incorporate by reference, what I said there. But it may be useful to accent here what I see as PF 15’s most serious defects: 1) the rule is bereft of standards to guide the district judge in determining whether or not to approve a subpoena, thus subjecting the grand jury’s investigatory power to what, in practical effect, is an arbitrary veto; and 2) the rule is not a minor disciplinary or procedural device but, in fact, will operate to override current federal case law concerning the powers of the grand jury.
I. THE RULE’S LACK OF STANDARDS
Judge Breyer’s catalog of the unanswered questions raised by PF 15 is impressive, and I join in much of the reasoning set forth in his opinion. The standard-less prophylaxis reflected in PF 15 — “prior judicial approval” — does indeed pose a whole host of practical and theoretical problems. These defects, as Judge Breyer suggests, may be attributable to the inadequacy of the procedures the court employed in formulating the rule.
But it is the consequence of the procedurally flawed rulemaking — not the inadequacy of the rulemaking itself — that is my primary concern. Of course, a more vigorous set of procedures might have produced no rule at all, or a different and better rule, a rule within the statutory authority of the district court. The cold reality, nonetheless, is that the rule that was in fact promulgated exceeds the district court’s powers. The rule before us could be saved by no administrative record, no matter how exhaustive. For one, the rule's lack of any intelligible standard to govern its application is sufficient in and of itself to render the rule invalid.
A commentator observed in 1965 that delegated law-making power had become “the dynamo of modern government.” L. Jaffe, Judicial Control of Administrative Action 33 (1965). If so, the instant rule vividly illustrates the extremes of this dynamo: PF 15 was promulgated pursuant to Fed.R.Crim.P. 57, which authorizes district courts to fill in some gaps in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure; Fed.R. Crim.P. 57 was promulgated by the Supreme Court pursuant to its authority to promulgate rules of criminal procedure under 18 U.S.C. §§ 3771, 3772 (1982); the latter is a statute enacted by Congress. The instant rule, which thus reflects a third layer of “delegation,” is a bestowal by the district judges of Massachusetts upon themselves, individually, of the unprecedented power to allow or prevent a grand jury subpoena. Even assuming the district court had this power to give away, its rule runs afoul of the most commonplace of delegation principles.
*669The principles governing legislative delegations of power to administrative agencies provide a useful analogy. These delegations are tolerable only when the dele-gatee’s decisionmaking is circumscribed by at least a modicum of legislative guidance. See Hampton v. United States, 276 U.S. 394, 409, 48 S.Ct. 348, 352, 72 L.Ed. 624 (1928) (a permissible delegation of legislative power must be accompanied by an “intelligible principle” to which the delega-tee’s decisions must conform). Here, in PF 15, the district court has vested completely uncanalized power to individual judges to “approv[e]” attorney subpoenas. The rule contains no principle, intelligible or otherwise, to guide these judges.2
A district court, to be sure, is not a legislature; and the district judges in whom PF 15 vests power over attorney subpoenas are judicial officers, not unaccountable agencies. But the district court’s powers under Rule 57 are inherently legislative. See Burlington Northern Railroad v. Woods, — U.S. -, 107 S.Ct. 967, 969 & n. 3, 94 L.Ed.2d 1 (1987) (noting that the power to fashion procedural rules for the federal judiciary flows from Article Ill’s grant to Congress of the power to establish federal courts, augmented by the Necessary and Proper Clause of Article I, § 8); see also Sibbach v. Wilson, 312 U.S. 1, 9-10, 61 S.Ct. 422, 424, 85 L.Ed. 479 (1941). Thus the principles of delegation, which constrain legislative activity, seem apposite. PF 15’s utterly standardless conferral of power on district judges renders it invalid.
II. THE OPERATION OF PF 15
An even more serious problem with PF 15 is that the novel substantive restraints which its operation inevitably imposes on the powers of the grand jury far exceed the “matters of detail” to which a local district court’s rule-making power extends.
Three members of this court are apparently willing to accept appellees’ curious contention that PF 15, as a matter of taxonomy, is a disciplinary rule. But I see little in it about attorney discipline. Both my colleagues and the appellees concede that the rule’s true purpose is to redress a perceived tilt in the balance of power between prosecutors and grand jury targets, an imbalance believed to threaten the relationship of an investigation target and his attorney. Arising as it does from this concern, the rule is most akin to an expanded rule of attorney-client privilege, placing a new and significant limitation upon a grand jury’s power to seek information from certain attorneys.
A look at PF 15 in its original context buttresses the idea that it is something other than a disciplinary rule. True, it is located among the 15 ethical standards the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has promulgated relating to the prosecuto-rial function.3 As do the 14 rules preceding it, PF 15 begins, “It shall be unprofessional conduct_” But there the similarity ends. The other rules all spell out the sort of behavior that is deemed unprofessional. Only PF 15 deviates from this “thou shalt not” structure. Had PF 15 truly been intended to provide an ethical standard, it would have been easy enough to make such a rule, specifying the sort of abuse of the subpoena power that constitutes an ethical violation. PF 15’s deviation from the standard structure of its neighboring disciplinary rules leads to the irresistible conclusion that the rule is not really about discipline.
If PF 15 is not about discipline, the question arises, “what is it really about?” On *670its face, it is nothing more than a grant of power to a judge to grant or deny a subpoena at will. Obviously, however, the authors of the rule anticipated that the subpoena will be approved or denied for some reason. This reason must be either 1) the threat the subpoena poses to the attorney-client relationship or 2) some other reason. For a judge to deny the subpoena for some reason other than its impact on the attorney-client relationship would almost certainly defy the Supreme Court’s holding that a grand jury’s inquiry can be substantively limited only by “constitutional, common-law, or statutory privileges.” Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665, 688, 92 S.Ct. 2646, 2660, 33 L.Ed.2d 626 (1972). Thus, we may assume that a judge’s ground for withholding approval of a subpoena under PF 15 will relate in some manner to its supposed threat to the attorney-client relationship, a relationship ultimately sheltered by the attorney-client privilege.4
Yet this assumption, far from resolving the problem, only leads to additional ones. If PF 15 is read to empower a judge to require the prosecutor to make some kind of a “showing” of need or relevance in order for the subpoena to issue, then the rule is at odds with In re Grand Jury Proceedings (Hill), 786 F.2d 3 (1st Cir.1986), a case in which this court refused to adopt this requirement. See also id. at 5 n. 2 (noting that most other circuits have rejected the need and relevance test; citing cases).
Even if “prior judicial approval” did not require any prosecutorial “showing,” PF 15 would still conflict with federal case law. It is well-settled law that a witness who is subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury is not entitled to the quashing of the subpoena in advance on the grounds of privilege, but must appear, testify, and invoke the privilege in response to particular questions. In re Certain Complaints Under Investigation, 783 F.2d 1488, 1518 (11th Cir.1986) (Campbell, C.J., sitting by designation) (collecting cases). The witness, moreover, bears the burden of proving each of the four elements of an attorney-client communication that render it privileged. United States v. Wilson, 798 F.2d 509, 512-13 (1st Cir.1986). Thus, PF 15’s apparent contemplation of an ex parte proceeding between judge and prosecutor — “it is unprofessional conduct for a prosecutor to subpoena an attorney without prior judicial approval” — would relieve the claimant of these burdens, substantially expanding the scope of the privilege. In short, it is difficult to imagine how PF 15 can operate meaningfully except as a substantive modification of the existing rules both of grand jury power and attorney-client privilege.5
In conclusion, because the inevitable tendency of PF 15 is to lead the judge into actions inconsistent with federal law, see supra, the rule cannot be dismissed as an innocuous “disciplinary” or procedural device. Either the judge will require the prosecutor to show the relevance of the subpoena, or will assess, in advance of the subpoena’s issuance, whether the attorney-client privilege applies. Both actions are impermissible under current law. Furthermore, the new requirement that this type of grand jury subpoena routinely be justified in advance is an unprecedented burden on the grand jury’s powers, putting the prosecutor on the horns of a dilemma. For the prosecutor must decide, as a matter of strategy, whether to forego an attorney *671subpoena if he fears a judge may deny it (thus keeping relevant information from the grand jury), or to seek approval of a subpoena and risk the possibility of having to appeal the judge’s denial (thus possibly, in some instances, antagonizing the judge and/or delaying the investigation). Whether this result is “good” or “bad” as a matter of policy is not the point. It clearly involves the creation of new substantive privilege law of very significant consequence. It is not the sort of matter of detail a single district court is empowered to legislate under its local rule-making authority.
I would, therefore, reverse the judgment below.

. The rule provides in full:
It is unprofessional conduct for a prosecutor to subpoena an attorney to a grand jury without prior judicial approval in circumstances where the prosecutor seeks to compel the attorney/witness to provide evidence concerning a person who is represented by the attorney/witness.
PF 15 was promulgated pursuant to Fed.R. Crim.P. 57, which empowers a district court to make rules "as to some matters of detail" in areas not covered by the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. See Fed.R.Crim.P. 57 advisory committee notes.
The general grant of rule-making power to federal courts is found in 28 U.S.C. § 2071 (1982):
The Supreme Court and all courts established by Act of Congress may from time to time prescribe rules for the conduct of their business. Such rules shall be consistent with Acts of Congress and rules of practice and procedure prescribed by the Supreme Court.

. It may be argued that these judges, after all, are not lawless people, and that they can be expected to carry out their responsibilities under PF 15 under the constraints of the law that guide them in any other judicial enterprise. As discussed below, however, existing law gives virtually no leeway to courts to impose prior restraints on the issuance of grand jury subpoenas. Not only are the federal rules entirely without hint of any authority of this nature, federal case law points the other way. Unless the judges never deny a subpoena, they will almost certainly act more expansively than current legal doctrine allows. Infra.

. All 15 of these prosecutorial function rules, which comprise SJC Rules 3:08, are incorporated as local rules of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts under Rule 5(d)(4)(B).

. Except, perhaps, in very exceptional circumstances, the legal protection afforded the attorney-client relationship will be co-extensive with the common law attorney-client privilege. But see In Re Grand Jury Matters, 751 F.2d 13 (1st Cir.1984). The contours of that privilege will ordinarily determine the extent to which the attorney-client relationship is protected by law. Windows of vulnerability in the attorney-client relationship are not “gaps” in the privilege rules; they are areas where there is no privilege.

. To the extent that PF 15 effects substantive change in the law of the attorney-client privilege, it is arguably beyond even the Supreme Court’s rule-making power. See Fed-R-Evid. 501 (the rules of privilege, in non-diversity cases, “shall be governed by the common law"). See also 28 U.S.C. § 2076 (1982) (providing a "fast track” method for congressional ratification of Supreme Court amendments to the Federal Rules of Evidence, save ”[a]ny such amendment creating, abolishing, or modifying a privilege," which can only be adopted by a full-blown act of Congress).