Court Opinion

ID: 9485987
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:35:27.291806+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:28.950656
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
with whom BAUER, Chief Judge, joins, concurring.
Our case is governed by the venerable rule that substantive changes in the law apply prospectively unless Congress expressly says otherwise. Bowen v. Georgetown University Hospital, 488 U.S. 204, 208-09, 109 S.Ct. 468, 471-72, 102 L.Ed.2d 493 (1988); Bennett v. New Jersey, 470 U.S. 632, 639-40, 105 S.Ct. 1555, 1559-61, 84 L.Ed.2d 572 (1985). United States v. Schooner Peggy, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 103, 2 L.Ed. 49 (1801). Congress did not say otherwise expressly or even by clear implication, and I therefore join the majority’s opinion.
Judge Cummings’ dissenting opinion, rejecting the rationale of Reynolds v. Martin, 985 F.2d 470, 473-74 (9th Cir.1993), concedes that Congress did not make an explicit decision. What then entitles Mojica to the benefits of the Civil Rights Act of 1991? The answer, according to the dissent, is that Congress did not change the law. It simply “overruled” some maverick decisions, including Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 491 U.S. 164, 109 S.Ct. 2363, 105 L.Ed.2d 132 (1989), restoring the law to its true state. Because “Gannett’s conduct was illegal under 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 and 2000e until the Supreme Court decided Patterson” (dissent at 565), we need not worry about retroactivity. The majority adopts the reasons Luddington v. Indiana Bell Telephone Co., 966 F.2d 225, 228-29 (7th Cir.1992), gave for rejecting a similar argument. Everything Luddington said on the topic is persuasive. I write separately to add a few thoughts in light of the weight the dissenting opinion accords to this subject.
Committee reports and articles in law reviews often speak of Congress “overruling” the Supreme Court, but like many a term chosen for rhetorical rather than analytical purposes the usage is ambiguous. Does it mean “The Supreme Court misunderstood the statute in force when it acted”? or does it mean “The legal rule the Supreme Court found in the existing statute is not the rule we prefer”? The former implies that the “overruling” statute regulates events that occurred before its enactment, for the new law ensures continuing operation of a rule that has been on the books all along. The latter implies prospective application, just like any other change in the law. Congress often concludes that existing rules are inadequate and provides new ones that it thinks superi- or. That the inadequacies in the existing statutes have been revealed by judicial decisions, rather than by the plaints of lobbyists, does not imply that a revision in the text of the United States Code is anything other than a spanking new rule of law.
Patterson and the other decisions “overruled” by the 1991 Act interpreted statutes dating as far back as the Civil Rights Act of 1866. When rejecting the result of Patterson, Congress and the President did not offer deeper insight into the text or structure of the 1866 Act, which does not speak to promotions — indeed, scarcely speaks to private conduct. Until 1968 judges uniformly understood the 1866 Act as limited to state action — requiring states to offer the same legal remedies to all citizens (so that black and white citizens had identical capacity to form and enforce contracts), but not requiring private parties to make contracts on particular terms, or at all. See The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 16-17, 3 S.Ct. 18, 24-26, 27 L.Ed. 835 (1883); Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323, 331, 46 S.Ct. 521, 524, 70 L.Ed. 969 (1926); Hurd v. Hodge, 334 U.S. 24, 31, 68 S.Ct. 847, 851, 92 L.Ed. 1187 (1948). Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409, 88 S.Ct. 2186, 20 L.Ed.2d 1189 (1968), gave the part of the 1866 Act that now appears in 42 U.S.C. § 1982 a broader reading, covering much private action. It was roundly criticized, not only by Justice Harlan in dissent, id. at 449-80, 88 S.Ct. at 2208-23, but also by legal historians, for misreading both the text *563and background of the 1866 Act. E.g., Charles Fairman, VI (1) History of the Supreme Court of the United, States: Reconstruction and Reunion 186U-88 1207-60 (1971); Gerhard Casper, Jones v. Mayer: Clio, Bemused and Confused Muse, 1968 Sup.Ct.Rev. 89. Eight years later Runyon v. McCrary, 427 U.S. 160, 96 S.Ct. 2586, 49 L.Ed.2d 415 (1976), extended Jones to litigation under § 1981. Four Justices wrote separately to wrestle with an important issue of stare decisis: should Jones, which they considered wrongly decided, be extended? Justice Stevens began: “For me the problem in these cases is whether to follow a line of authority which I firmly believe to have been incorrectly decided.” 427 U.S. at 189, 96 S.Ct. at 2608. Two Justices (Powell and Stevens) answered yes; two (White and Rehnquist) answered no. Chief Justice Burger and Justice Blackmun, who joined the Court after Jones, did not communicate their view of that opinion’s interpretation of the 1866 Act.
After Runyon held that § 1981 applies to private and public contracts alike, intermediate courts had to decide what this means in practice. When asking questions such as “Does a failure to promote an employee because of that employee’s sex violate § 1981?”, federal judges no longer returned to the materials from 1866. Instead they asked about the reasoning of Jones and Runyon. How far had the Supreme Court gone? What were the Justices likely to instruct them to do next? Neither Jones nor Runyon dealt with promotions or discharges; indeed, neither dealt with discrimination on account of sex or national origin. Several courts of appeals held after Runyon that a failure to promote an employee because of that person’s sex was actionable; the fourth circuit disagreed. 805 F.2d 1143 (1986). Patterson became a cause célebre because, after granting certiorari to resolve the conflict and hearing oral argument, the Court requested briefs and reargument on the question whether Runyon should be reconsidered. 485 U.S. 617, 108 S.Ct. 1419, 99 L.Ed.2d 879 (1988). Because Runyon depended on Jones, the order called into question the application of the whole 1866 Act to private action. In the event, the Court overruled neither Runyon nor Jones — but it also declined to extend them. It said that Runyon itself was as far as it was willing to take the holding of Jones. Section 1981 establishes equal rights to “make and enforce” contracts; adopting rules for modifying and ending contracts is a legislative task, the Court concluded.
Congress accepted the invitation but encountered problems in the details. It is easy to say that discriminatory failure to promote should be actionable, but does this mean that employees must use administrative remedies (as under Title VII), or may they proceed straight to court as under the 1866 Act? What statute of limitations will apply — the short federal one under Title VII, or the longer state rules under § 1988? What remedies are available — back pay as under Title VII, or compensatory and punitive damages? What price can the opponents of any change extract? The 1991 Act contains compromises on many topics. The compromises were essential to its enactment. Both the nature of the question before the Court in Patterson and the nature of the legislative response show that Congress did not “overrule” Patterson in the sense of concluding that Patterson misunderstood the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The true meaning of that Act was not even before the Court (unless it was prepared to revisit Jones); and once we pass from interpreting the law to interpreting pri- or judicial decisions, there is no easy answer to the question whether and how far a judge should press cases such as Jones and Runyon.
Nothing that Congress enacted offers a superior reading of the 1866 Act. What some Senators and Representatives may have thought about the original meaning of § 1981 does not matter; only what the political branches of the government agreed on is law. Congress and the President did not agree that The Civil Rights Cases and all other opinions interpreting that statute during the first 102 years of its existence were wrongly decided and that Charles Fairman got his history wrong, that the serious debate in Jones and Runyon about the meaning of the 1866 Act and the scope of stare decisis was all pointless. Congress and the Presi*564dent jointly resolved a complex contemporary debate about how employers should behave, and what remedies are available if they do not.
Revisiting the merits of judicial decisions is not part of a legislator’s job description. Congress legislates, writing laws rather than rewriting history. The political branches of government altered the text of § 1981 (and several other laws) in order to alter legal obligations and penalties. Cf. Robertson v. Seattle Audubon Society, — U.S. -, 112 S.Ct. 1407, 118 L.Ed.2d 73 (1992). The inability of legislative and executive branches to agree whether these new rules and penalties apply to employment decisions predating November 21, 1991, bucks the question to the judicial branch. And our branch of government has a rule governing such situations, a rule forged early in the nation’s constitutional history and applied, with rare exceptions, for 200 years.
The difference between legislative and judicial roles in government supplies the answer to the dissenting opinion’s observation that “[i]f we can tolerate retroactive application of court decisions, we should be able to tolerate retroactive application of statutes that overrule those decisions” (dissent at 567). Patterson was not “retroactive” in any interesting sense; it did not overrule any earlier opinion. It simply declined to extend Runyon. This meant, of course, that courts taking § 1981 for all it could be worth had not read their tea leaves correctly, but resolving a conflict among the circuits in a particular fashion does not effect a retroactive “change” in the law. There was only one law, the 1866 Act, although there were divergent views about its meaning. So far as inferior courts within the federal judiciary are concerned, Patterson gives the one right meaning of § 1981, as it stood between 1866 and 1991.
Litigants adversely affected by Patterson would not care about the difference between a failure to extend Runyon and a retroactive overruling of Runyon, but the judicial task is to carry out the law, not what people hope the law is. Patterson interpreted a statute that had been on the books for 123 years. Courts apply their interpretations to pending cases because the rule they are interpreting predates the parties’ acts. Judicial interpretations “change the law” from (losing) litigants’ perspective, but from the judicial perspective the process of interpretation aims at getting as close as one can to a meaning that predates the litigation. See Harper v. Virginia Department of Taxation, — U.S. -, -, 113 S.Ct. 2510, 2516-18, 125 L.Ed.2d 74 (1993); James B. Beam Distilling Co. v. Georgia, — U.S. -, -, 111 S.Ct. 2439, 2442-45, 115 L.Ed.2d 481 (1991); American Trucking Associations, Inc. v. Smith, 496 U.S. 167, 201, 110 S.Ct. 2323, 2343, 110 L.Ed.2d 148 (1990) (Scalia, J., concurring), id. at 209-24, 110 S.Ct. at 2347-56 (Stevens, J., joined by Brennan, Marshall & Blackmun, JJ., dissenting).
Today we apply the 1866 Act to events that occurred while its original text was in force. Congress concluded that a different rule would best serve the nation in the future. Our part is to apply each statute to decisions taken during its reign.