Court Opinion

ID: 9448920
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 23:49:53.105641+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:36.878683
License: Public Domain

JONES, Chief Judge, and DURFEE, LARAMORE and WHITAKER, Judges,
concur.
APPENDIX
The legislative history is quite inconclusive with respect to preclusion of judicial review of Correction Board determinations.
1. The position that Congress affirmatively intended judicial review of Correction Board actions is founded upon (a) the deletion from the finality provision of the Correction Board statute (now 10 U.S.C. § 1552, formerly 5 U.S.C. § 191a; Act of October 25, 1951, 65 Stat. 655) of any reference to the courts; (b) some colloquies at the House hearings at which certain Congressmen indicated their expectation that judicial review would be accorded; (c) the absence of any finality provision explicitly applying to the courts, and (d) the statement in the committee report that “the courts of the United States should not be precluded from reviewing such cases under appropriate circumstances.” See Jones, Jurisdiction of the Federal Courts to Review the Character of Military Administrative Discharges, 57 Col.L.Rev. 917, 967-971 (Nov. 1957); Friedman v. United States, 158 F.Supp. 364, 141 Ct.Cl. 239; Madden, J., dissenting in Haislip v. United States; Brief of Reserve Officer Association, amicus curiae, in Lipp case, pp. 39-40. Taken together with *404the general principle normally favoring limited judicial scrutiny of administrative action,29 these materials in the legislative history do furnish support for the view that all judicial review was not precluded. However, these materials go no further than to sustain the proposition that the types of Correction Boards rulings which are reviewable are those which would also be reviewable if made by other entities within the Defense Department. Correction Board proceedings would not render reviewable those substantive rulings which would otherwise be immune from review.
2. On the other hand, there are also indications in the legislative history pointing toward the conclusion that Correction Board decisions are not reviewable at all. First, it is clear that the Correction Boards were initially authorized in 1946 to provide an administrative substitute for the enactment of private bills for the correction of military or naval records; and such private laws were, of course, not reviewable by the courts (except for constitutionality); since the Correction Board stands in the place of such private legislation it can be argued that Board action should be equally immune from judicial review. Second, the original finality clause proposed for the 1951 amendment (the clause which initially provided that Board decisions “shall be final and conclusive * * * including review by the courts * * * ”, which was later modified to omit the reference to the courts) was introduced with reference only to subsection (b), the money settlement section,30 and not with reference to subsection (a), which was the general provision granting power to the Secretaries to make corrections to remedy injustice or error. From the House hearings there is ground for the view that the reason this finality provision was modified to delete all reference to the courts, and transferred from subsection (b) to subsection (a), was to make sure that the General Accounting Office (and this court) would not be precluded from passing on the monetary correctness of sums owing to a claimant as a result of a favorable decision by the Board, i. e., a Board decision correcting a military record in such a way that money would be owing the claimant. The General Accounting Office stressed its concern with compensation and not with the substantive aspects of a Board decision (see the dissent in Haislip, supra), and the changes in the finality clause appear to have been made (at least in part) to meet these objections. After these changes were made, there were statements in the course of a colloquy between Representative Vinson, the chairman of the full committee, and Representative Smart, the spokesman for the subcommittee, which seem to say (without being explicit as to judicial review) that Congress intended the Secretary’s authority to be final and conclusive except for computation of amounts (See I Hearings before the House Committee on Armed Services [No. 27], Full Committee Hearings on * * * H.R. 1181 * * *, 82d Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 600-601 (June 5, 1951)).
This legislative history can be argued to define the “appropriate circumstances” (the term the Committee Report used, H.Rept. No. 449, 82d Cong., p. 3) which Congress envisaged for judicial review as being solely the question of the determination and computation of the cmowits due as a result of a correction made by the Secretary. Once the Secretary has effected a correction which would entitle the applicant to recover money from the United States, under the Correction Board statute he cannot properly deny the applicant all the monies to which his *405•entitlement has been established by or •as the result of a Correction Board proceeding. These, it can be said, are the •only “appropriate circumstances” for judicial review to which the legislative history had reference. The earlier colloquy at the hearings involving Congressmen Doyle and Clements — on which reliance has been placed (see Friedman v. United States, 158 F.Supp. 364, 141 Ct.Cl. 239, 257)31 — can be said to represent only their own views and not the position of the subcommittee, or the full committee, let alone of the House or the Senate as a whole.

. E.g., Harmon, v. Brucker, [Abramowitz v. Brucker], 355 U.S. 579, 78 S.Ct. 433, 2 L.Ed.2d 503; Leedom v. Kyne, 358 U.S. 184, 79 S.Ct. 180, 3 L.Ed.2d 210; Stark v. Wickard, 321 U.S. 288, 64 S.Ct. 559, 88 L.Ed. 733.

. In this colloquy, the Congressmen seemed to indicate that they contemplated

. I.e., tbe provision authorizing the services to make payments to servicemen whose records had been corrected in their favor. *405general court review of decisions of the Correction Board.