Court Opinion

ID: 9498219
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:11:30.914467+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:41.807128
License: Public Domain

SUTTON, Circuit Judge,
with whom Judge GIBBONS joins, concurring.
All three judges on the panel can agree on one thing: The constitutionality of Officer Foubert’s use of force against Lyons is a difficult and fact-intensive question under our case law, but one that we nonetheless are obliged to reach at the outset under the two-step qualified-immunity inquiry announced in Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 200-01, 121 S.Ct. 2151, 150 L.Ed.2d 272 (2001); see also Brosseau v. Haugen, — U.S. -, -& n. 3, 125 S.Ct. 596, 598 & n. 3, 160 L.Ed.2d 583 (2004). I cannot resist adding still another separate writing in this case that questions the rigidity of this requirement. While I see the virtue in telling lower courts that they should generally answer the constitutional question before the clearly established question, I wonder whether it makes sense to mandate that they do so in all cases, no matter the costs, no matter the ease with which the second question might be answered.
In Saucier, the Court for the first time held that whether “the facts alleged show the officer’s conduct violated a constitutional right ... must be the initial inquiry” in a qualified immunity case. Id. at 201, 121 S.Ct. 2151 (emphasis added). “In the course of determining whether a constitutional right was violated on the premises alleged,” the Court explained, “a court might find it necessary to set forth principles which will become the basis for a holding that a right is clearly established.” Id. Only then may courts turn to “the next, sequential step,” namely “whether the right was clearly established.” Id.
The requirement that lower courts review more difficult constitutional questions before turning to easier qualified-immunity questions, Saucier reasoned, is necessary to support the Constitution’s “elaboration from case to case” and to prevent constitutional stagnation. Id. “The law might be deprived of this explanation were a court simply to skip ahead to the question whether the law clearly established that the officer’s conduct was unlawful in the circumstances of the case.” Id.; see also id. at 207, 121 S.Ct. 2151 (“Our instruction to the district courts and courts of appeals to concentrate at the outset on the definí*581tion of the constitutional right and to determine whether, on the facts alleged, a constitutional violation could be found is important. As we have said, the procedure permits courts in appropriate cases to elaborate the constitutional right with greater degrees of specificity.”); see also County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U.S. 833, 842 n. 5, 118 S.Ct. 1708, 140 L.Ed.2d 1043 (1998) (“What is more significant is that if the policy of avoidance were always followed in favor of ruling on qualified immunity whenever there was no clearly settled constitutional rule of primary conduct, standards of official conduct would tend to remain uncertain, to the detriment both of officials and individuals. An immunity determination, with nothing more, provides no clear standard, constitutional or nonconstitutional.”).
As the Court has acknowledged, see id,., requiring courts preemptively to resolve constitutional questions where non-constitutional grounds for disposition remain readily available cuts against the normal grain of constitutional adjudication. The customary rule is that a court “will not pass upon a constitutional question although properly presented by the record, if there is also present some other ground upon which the case may be disposed of.” Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Auth., 297 U.S. 288, 347, 56 S.Ct. 466, 80 L.Ed. 688 (1936) (Brandeis, J., concurring); see also Clark v. Martinez, — U.S. -, 125 S.Ct. 716, 160 L.Ed.2d 734 (2005). Outside of the qualified-immunity context, I can think of just one setting in which federal courts must address constitutional questions before non-constitutional questions — when they adhere to the Article III requirement that they resolve jurisdictional issues before merits issues — and that rule plainly does not apply here. See Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Environment, 523 U.S. 83, 94-95, 118 S.Ct. 1003, 140 L.Ed.2d 210 (1998) (“The requirement that jurisdiction be established as a threshold matter ... is inflexible and without exception.”).
Saucier and Lewis convincingly explain why the constitutional-avoidance doctrine does not naturally apply in the qualified-immunity setting. The constitutional and non-constitutional questions in a qualified immunity case overlap, and it often may be difficult to decide whether a right is clearly established without deciding precisely what the existing constitutional right happens to be. And while injunction actions in civil cases and suppression motions and other pleadings in criminal cases provide avenues for the case-by-case development of the meaning of various constitutional guarantees, there is a risk that some constitutional guarantees would never become established (or would only slowly become established) if federal courts reflexively decided the second qualified immunity question before deciding the first one. All of this, however, just proves that the “better approach” in this area is to resolve the first inquiry before the second one, Lewis, 523 U.S. at 842 n. 5, 118 S.Ct. 1708. It does not prove that the approach should be followed in all cases, and indeed a majority of the Justices have questioned the value of this strict requirement in recent years. See Brosseau, 125 S.Ct. at 601 (Breyer, Scalia and Ginsburg, JJ., concurring) (noting that the Saucier, inquiry requires that lower courts “decide difficult constitutional questions when there is available an easier basis for the decision” and that “when courts’ dockets are crowded, a rigid ‘order of battle’ makes little administrative sense and can sometimes lead to a constitutional issue that is effectively insulated from review”); Bunting v. Mellen, 541 U.S. 1019, 1025, 124 S.Ct. 1750, 158 L.Ed.2d 636 (2004) (Scalia and Rehnquist, JJ., dissenting from the denial of certiorari) (“We should either make clear that constitutional determinations are not insulated from *582our review ... or else drop any pretense at requiring the ordering in every case.”); Saucier, 533 U.S. at 216, 121 S.Ct. 2151 (Ginsburg, Breyer and Stevens, JJ., concurring) (concurring in the judgment, “but not in the two-step inquiry the Court has ordered”); Lewis, 523 U.S. at 858-59, 118 S.Ct. 1708 (Breyer, J., concurring) (arguing that lower courts should be able to “avoid wrestling with constitutional issues that are either difficult or poorly presented”); id. at 859, 118 S.Ct. 1708 (Stevens, J., concurring) (noting that confronting the constitutional question first “is sound advice when the answer to the constitutional question is clear,” but that, where “the question is both difficult and unresolved, ... it [is] wiser to adhere to the policy of avoiding the unnecessary adjudication of constitutional questions”).
There are occasional settings, it seems to' me, in which a “rigid order of battle,” Brosseau, 125 S.Ct. at 601 (Breyer, Scalia and Ginsburg, JJ., concurring), is difficult to justify. What of the district court that faces a complaint alleging dozens of constitutional violations? Must the court follow this sequence on every claim, even when some of the claims submit to easy resolution on the clearly established question? What of the appellate panel facing a set of briefs in which the constitutional question is not only difficult but inadequately briefed? Must the panel nonetheless ascertain the answer to the constitutional question, even when the clearly established answer is answerable after one reading of the briefs? And what of other settings: the appellate panel that cannot agree on the' appropriate resolution of the constitutional question but can readily agree on the resolution of the clearly established question; the panel faced with a poorly presented constitutional question but an easily resolved clearly established question, see Lewis, 523 U.S. at 859, 118 S.Ct. 1708 (Stevens, J., concurring); the panel faced with a constitutional question that is not only difficult but highly fact specific and therefore unlikely to provide meaningful guidance in future cases; or the panel faced with a constitutional question that is essentially irrelevant to the ease at hand because of significant intervening developments in the law?
There are many possibilities here. And it is difficult to believe that every one of them favors an unyielding order of decision. Nor is it clear that requiring lower courts to decide the constitutional issue in settings like these — where all can readily agree on the answer to the clearly established question' — will necessarily improve the courts’ ability to decide each constitutional question correctly. Just as the Court has been right to identify the risk that the constitutional question might infrequently, if ever, be decided, see Lewis, 523 U.S. at 842 n. 5, 118 S.Ct. 1708, so there is a risk that constitutional questions may be prematurely and incorrectly decided in cases where they are not well presented.
Heightening these concerns is the fact that some constitutional rulings effectively will be insulated from review by the en banc court of appeals or the Supreme Court where the appellate panel identifies a constitutional violation but grants qualified immunity under the second inquiry. See Bunting, 541 U.S. at 1023-24, 124 S.Ct. 1750 (Scalia and Rehnquist, JJ., dissenting from the denial of certiorari); see also Horne v. Coughlin, 191 F.3d 244, 247 (2d Cir.1999); Kalka v. Hawk, 215 F.3d 90, 96 (D.C.Cir.2000). By multiplying constitutional holdings that are not subject to review in the normal course, a rigid application of the two-step inquiry may do as much to unsettle the law as to settle it.
An unbending requirement in this area produces another oddity: The same lower-court judges that are supposed to adhere *583to this rule are given complete discretion over whether to publish a given decision. Appellate panels that choose not to publish a decision no more create binding precedent than those that decide only the clearly established question. See Wilson v. Layne, 526 U.S. 603, 623-24 & n. 6, 119 S.Ct. 1692, 143 L.Ed.2d 818 (1999) (Stevens, J., dissenting) (recognizing that the Fourth Circuit has adopted a rule that unreported opinions may not be considered in the course of determining qualified immunity) (citing Hogan v. Carter, 85 F.3d 1113, 1118 (4th Cir.1996)). Lower federal courts given the authority to exercise judgment about when to publish their decisions, it seems to me, ought to be given authority occasionally to decide the last qualified immunity question before the threshold one. The same administrative concerns that permit the former ought to permit the latter.
Finally, while the risk of stagnating constitutional doctrines is a legitimate one, it is not self-evident that the problem has impeded the growth of American constitutional law. The same risk exists in other areas of law — both judge-made (the harmless-error doctrine, the rule announced in Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 299-310, 109 S.Ct. 1060, 103 L.Ed.2d 334 (1989)) and legislatively made (the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1)). And yet the ability of courts to skip to the second inquiry (e.g., to go straight to the harmlessness of the error or Teague’s new-rule inquiry, see, e.g., Caspari v. Bohlen, 510 U.S. 383, 389, 114 S.Ct. 948, 127 L.Ed.2d 236 (1994) (permitting federal habeas courts to ask whether a habeas petitioner’s claim implicates a “new” rule and is therefore barred by Teague before addressing the claim on the merits)) does not seem materially to have inhibited the development of constitutional law.
The existence of these rules as well as the authority not to make a published federal case about every dispute suggests two things. One, the point is not to maximize the number of constitutional rulings but to optimize constitutional rulings, as traded off against essential administrative values, such as the accurate, efficient and timely resolution of cases in the federal courts. Two, even in the absence of rules mandating that they address the constitutional issue first, courts routinely do so on their own. See, e.g., Pope v. Illinois, 481 U.S. 497, 501-04, 107 S.Ct. 1918, 95 L.Ed.2d 439 (1987) (addressing constitutional question before determining whether any error was harmless). Addressing a more concrete issue (was there a constitutional violation?) before turning to a more abstract issue (was it clearly established?) will generally present an easier mode of analysis than approaching matters the other way around.
Much as the Saucier two-step inquiry is a reasoned departure from the general rule that a court “will not pass upon a constitutional question” unless essential to the disposition of a case, see Ashwander, 297 U.S. at 347, 56 S.Ct. 466 (Brandeis, J., concurring), so also the Court should permit lower courts to make reasoned departures from Saucier’s inquiry where principles of sound and efficient judicial administration recommend a variance. Here, as elsewhere, avoiding difficult and divisive constitutional questions will at times promote, not hinder, the enforcement and development of the law.
The alternative, as the four separate opinions from this three-judge panel illustrate, is to require courts to issue narrow, panel-riven, fact-bound constitutional rulings of limited precedential value, only to have them then announce that the government officials are entitled to qualified immunity because the precedents “taken to*584gether undoubtedly show that this area is one in which the result depends very much on the facts of each ease.” Brosseau, 125 S.Ct. at 600. And of course in Brosseau itself, the very case that prompted the Court to ask us to take a second look at this case, the Court did not address the constitutional question but only the clearly established question. Lower federal courts ought to have the same authority.