Court Opinion

ID: 9425339
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:14:25.604379+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:54.848243
License: Public Domain

Mr. Chief Justice Burger,
with whom Mr. Justice Rehnquist joins, dissenting.
I find myself unable to join the action taken today because the Court in this case strays from what seem to me sound and established constitutional principles in order to reach what it considers a just result in a particular case; this gives meaning to the ancient warning that “hard cases make bad law.” The Court permits this “hard” case to make some very dubious law.
A state university today is an establishment with capital costs of many millions of dollars of investment. Its annual operating costs likewise may run into the millions. Parents and other taxpayers willingly carry this heavy burden because they believe in the values of higher education. It is not narrow provincialism for the State *460to think that each State should carry its own educational burdens. Until we redefine our system of government— as we are free to do by constitutionally prescribed means — the States may restrict subsidized education to their own residents. This much the Court recognizes and it likewise recognizes that the statutory scheme under review reasonably tends to support that end.
Commendably, the Court has tried to cast the opinion in the narrowest possible terms, but it seems nonetheless to accomplish a transferrence of the elusive and arbitrary “compelling state interest” concept into the orbit of the Due Process Clause. The Court categorizes the Connecticut statutory classification as a “permanent and irrebuttable presumption”; it explains that this “presumption” leads to unseemly results in this and other isolated cases; and it relies upon the State’s stopgap guidelines for determining bona fide residency to demonstrate that “the State has reasonable alternative means of making the crucial determination.” This is the language of strict scrutiny. We ought not try to correct “unseemly results” of state statutes by resorting to constitutional adjudication.
Distressingly, the Court applies “strict scrutiny” and invalidates Connecticut’s statutory scheme without explaining why the statute impairs a genuine constitutional interest truly worthy of the standard of close judicial scrutiny. The real issue here is not whether holes can be picked in the Connecticut scheme; of course, that is readily done with this “bad” statute. Whether we deal with statutes of Connecticut or of Congress, we can find flaws, gaps, and hard and unseemly results at times. But our function in constitutional adjudication is not to see whether there is some conceivably “less restrictive” alternative to the statutory classifications under review. The Court’s task is to explain why the “strict scrutiny” test, *461previously confined to other areas, should now in practical effect be read into the Due Process Clause. The drift of Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U. S. 645 (1972), on which the Court relies heavily, was to apply a similar test, but at least there the Court essayed to explain that the rights of fatherhood and family were regarded as “ 'essential’ ” and “ 'basic civil rights of man,’ ” id., at 651, and to provide an analytic basis for the result reached. To the same effect was Bell v. Burson, 402 U. S. 535 (1971), where the Court noted that suspension of a driver’s license might impair the pursuit of a livelihood, thereby infringing ''important interests of the licensees.” Id., at 539. Carrington v. Rash, 380 U. S. 89 (1965), an equal protection case, involved deprivation of the right to vote, by the Court’s, and Mr. Justice Stewart’s own description, a matter ''close to the core of our constitutional system.” Id., at 96.*
*462There will be, I fear, some ground for a belief that the Court now engrafts the “close judicial scrutiny” test onto the Due Process Clause whenever we deal with something like “permanent irrebuttable presumptions.” But literally thousands of state statutes create classifications permanent in duration, which are less than perfect, as all legislative classifications are, and might be improved on by individualized determinations so as to avoid the untoward results produced here due to the very unusual facts of this case. Both the anomaly present here and the arguable alternatives to it do not differ from those present when, for example, a State provides that a person may not be licensed to practice medicine or law unless he or she is a graduate of an accredited professional graduate school; a perfectly capable practitioner may as a consequence be barred “permanently and irre-buttably” from pursuing his calling, without ever having an opportunity to prove his personal skills. The doctrinal difficulties of the Equal Protection Clause are indeed trying, but today the Court makes an uncharted drift toward complications for the Due Process Clause comparable in scope and seriousness with those we are encountering in the equal protection area. Can this be what we are headed for?
The pressure of today’s holding may well push the States to enact reciprocal statutes to the end that Connecticut will undertake to admit as “resident” students only those students from other States that give the same status to Connecticut residents. When a State allocates a large share of its resources to create and maintain a university whose quality is found attractive to many students from other States, its very success and stature may well operate to cripple it because then, not unnaturally, it will be flooded with applications from students from afar. Perhaps on less “high ground” students who favor winter sports will flock to the Northeast and *463Northwest and the sun worshipers will head South. Is the Court willing to say that Connecticut may not grant partial scholarships to persons who have attended a Connecticut secondary school for — let us say — at least one full school year and then set nonresident tuition as it does now? We should not be surprised at the natural response of States which, having placed high value on universities, having developed great institutions at large cost, believe that other States should do the same and therefore seek ways to keep the institution in being for its own citizens. I do not suggest these things ought to be done or that they are desirable; rather, I submit, when we examine a statute of a State we should lay aside preferences for or against what the State does in a few particular or isolated cases and look only to what the Constitution forbids a State to do, so as to avoid putting pressure on the States to engage in legislative devices to escape from the hobbles we place on them on matters of purely state concern.
The urge to cure every disadvantage human beings can experience exerts an inexorable pressure to expand judicial doctrine. But that urge should not move the Court to erect standards that are unrealistic and indeed unexplained for evaluating the constitutionality of state statutes.

Implicit in my dissenting vote, of course, is my disagreement with Mr. Justice White’s suggestion that the “weight and value” of the appellees’ interest in obtaining a higher education require us to pay something less than the usual deference to the judgment of the Connecticut Legislature. If appellees’ chances of securing higher education were truly in jeopardy as a result of the tuition differential at issue here, there would at least be an arguable basis for special concern, though for me the San Antonio case would provide a serious obstacle to any departure from the traditional “rational basis” test. In this case, there is, in any event, no allegation by either appellee that the higher out-of-state tuition charge does, will, or even may deprive her of the opportunity to attend the University of Connecticut. Thus, try as I may, I find it impossible to understand why the interest of appellees at issue here amounts to any more or any less than the number of dollars they are required to pay in excess of Connecticut's in-state tuition rate. That amount may be “substantial,” but the Court has never suggested that financial impact, per se, requires abandonment of the “rational basis” test of equal protection review as Mr. Justice White suggests. Indeed, I had always thought that a simple financial deprivation was the classic case for judicial deference to legislative choices.