Court Opinion

ID: 9421427
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:58:15.259564+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:30.110368
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
whom Mr. Justice Clark and Mr. Justice Harlan join,
concurring.
Certainly since the time of Edward I, through all the vicissitudes of seven centuries of Anglo-American history, the legal profession has played a role all its own. The bar has not enjoyed prerogatives; it has been entrusted with anxious responsibilities. One does not have to inhale the self-adulatory bombast of after-dinner speeches to affirm that all the interests of man that are comprised under the constitutional guarantees given to “life, liberty and property” are in the professional keeping of lawyers. It is a fair characterization of the lawyer’s responsibility in our society that he stands “as a shield,” to quote Dev-lin, J., in defense of right and to ward off wrong. From a profession charged with such responsibilities there must be exacted those qualities of truth-speaking, of a high sense of honor, of granite discretion, of the strictest observance of fiduciary responsibility, that have, throughout the centuries, been compendiously described as “moral character.”
*248From the thirteenth century to this day, in England the profession itself has determined who should enter it. In the United States the courts exercise ultimate control. But while we have nothing comparable to the Inns of Court, with us too the profession itself, through appropriate committees, has long had a vital interest, as a sifting agency, in determining the fitness, and above all the moral fitness, of those who are certified to be entrusted with the fate of clients. With us too the requisite “moral character” has been the historic unquestioned prerequisite of fitness. Admission to practice in a State and before its courts necessarily belongs to that State. Of course, legislation laying down general conditions of an arbitrary or discriminatory character may, like other legislation, fall afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment. See Cummings v. Missouri, 4 Wall. 277. A very different question is presented when this Court is asked to review the exercise of judgment in refusing admission to the bar in an individual case, such as we have here.
It is beyond this Court’s function to act as overseer of a particular result of the procedure established by a particular State for admission to its bar. No doubt satisfaction of the requirement of moral character involves an exercise of delicate judgment on the part of those who reach a conclusion, having heard and seen the applicant for admission, a judgment of which it may be said as it was of “many honest and sensible judgments” in a different context that it expresses “an intuition of experience which outruns analysis and sums up many unnamed and tangled impressions; impressions which may lie beneath consciousness without losing their worth.” Chicago, B. & Q. R. Co. v. Babcock, 204 U. S. 585, 598. Especially in this realm it is not our business to substitute our judgment for the State’s judgment — for it is the State in all the panoply of its powers that is under review when the action of its Supreme Court is under review.
*249Nor is the division of power between this Court and that of the States in such matters altered by the fact that the judgment here challenged involves the application of a conception like that of “moral character,” which has shadowy rather than precise bounds. It cannot be that that conception — moral character — has now been found to be so indefinite, because necessarily implicating what are called subjective factors, that the States may no longer exact it from those who are to carry on “the public profession of the law.” (See Elihu Root, in 2 A. B. A. J. 736.) To a wide and deep extent, the law depends upon the disciplined standards of the profession and belief in the integrity of the courts. We cannot fail to accord such confidence to the state process, and we must attribute to its courts the exercise of a fair and not a biased judgment in passing upon the applications of those seeking entry into the profession.
But judicial action, even in an individual case, may have been based on avowed considerations that are inadmissible in that they violate the requirements of due process. Refusal to allow a man to qualify himself for the profession on a wholly arbitrary standard or on a consideration that offends the dictates of reason offends the Due Process Clause. Such is the case here.
Living under hard circumstances, the petitioner, while still in his teens, encountered the confusions and dislocations of the great depression. By one of those chance occurrences that not infrequently determine the action of youth, petitioner joined the Young Communist League toward the end of his high-school days. That association led to membership in the Communist Party, which he retained until the Hitler-Stalin Pact began a disaffection that was completed by his break with the Party in 1940. After 1940, the record of his life, including three years of honorable service in the army, establishes that these early associations, and the outlook they reflected, had *250been entirely left behind.* After his war service, three years as a small businessman, and one year at Western Michigan College, 'petitioner resolved on becoming a lawyer. And so in 1950, at the age of 36, he enrolled in the University of New Mexico Law School and made full disclosure of his early Communist career to its Dean. These are the facts that, taken together with the use of aliases and arrests without conviction or even prosecution, both in his early years, led the Supreme Court of New Mexico, in an original proceeding before it after adverse action by the Board of Bar Examiners, to deny petitioner’s application to take the bar examination.
For me, the controlling element in determining whether such denial offended the Due Process Clause is the significance that the New Mexico Supreme Court accorded the early Communist affiliations. In its original opinion and in its opinion on rehearing, the court thus reiterated its legal position:
“We believe one who has knowingly given his loyalties to such a program and belief for six to seven years during a period of responsible adulthood is a person of questionable character.” 60 N. M. 304, 319, 339, 291 P. 2d 607, 617, 630.
Since the New Mexico Supreme Court unequivocally held this to be a factor without which, on a fair reading of its opinion, it would not have denied the application, the conclusion that it drew from all the factors in necessary combination must fall if it drew an unwarranted legal conclusion from petitioner’s early Communist affiliation. Not unnaturally the New Mexico Supreme Court evi*251dently assumed that use of aliases in the pre-1940 period, several unprosecuted arrests, and what it deemed “his present attitude toward those matters,” 60 N. M., at 339, 291 P. 2d, at 630 (as drawn from the printed record and not on the basis of having given the petitioner a hearing before the court) precluded denial of his application on these factors alone.
This brings me to the inference that the court drew from petitioner’s early, pre-1940 affiliations. To hold, as the court did, that Communist affiliation for six to seven years up to 1940, fifteen years prior to the court’s assessment of it, in and of itself made the petitioner “a person of questionable character” is so dogmatic an inference as to be wholly unwarranted. History overwhelmingly establishes that many youths like the petitioner were drawn by the mirage of communism during the depression era, only to have their eyes later opened to reality. Such experiences no doubt may disclose a woolly mind or naive notions regarding the problems of society. But facts of history that we would be arbitrary in rejecting bar the presumption, let alone an irrebuttable presumption, that response to foolish, baseless hopes regarding the betterment of society made those who had entertained them but who later undoubtedly came to their senses and their sense of responsibility “questionable characters.” Since the Supreme Court of New Mexico as a matter of law took a contrary view of such a situation in denying petitioner’s application, it denied him due process of law.
I therefore concur in the judgment.

The only bit of evidence that may be adduced to the contrary is a single phrase in a letter to his wife in 1944. To give it an unfavorable and disqualifying significance in the entire context of the letter is to draw so strained a meaning as to be inadmissibly unreasonable.