Court Opinion

ID: 9542623
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:36:45.331109+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:08:29.048514
License: Public Domain

Utter, J.
(concurring in the dissent) — The majority and dissent have written scholarly and complete opinions upon which I cannot elaborate. While I am ordinarily willing to recognize the need for deference to the legislature in economic and social welfare legislation, it seems to me the court should be less willing to defer to legislative judgment when the classification was made many years ago and social and economic factors, which were the basis of the classification, have changed.
Courts have refused to defer to legislative judgment for this reason in a number of cases. In Milnot Co. v. Richardson, 350 F. Supp. 221 (S.D. Ill. 1972), the court held a classification which was once rational because of a given set of circumstances may lose its rationality if the relevant factual premise is totally altered. The United States Supreme Court in Nashville, C. & St. L. Ry. v. Walters, 294 U.S. 405, 79 L. Ed. 949, 55 S. Ct. 486 (1935), held that a statute valid as to one set of facts may be invalid as to another and a statute valid when enacted may become invalid by changing conditions to which it is applied. In Leary v. United States, 395 U.S. 6, 38, 23 L. Ed. 2d 57, 89 S. Ct. 1532 (1969), the Supreme Court held, in deciding the constitutionality of a legislatively enacted criminal statutory presumption, that the court also considers more recent data than that available when the presumption was enacted. The reason for so doing was “in order both to obtain a broader general background and to ascertain whether the intervening years have witnessed significant changes which might bear upon the presumption’s validity.” The court also noted that “[a] statute based upon a legislative declaration of facts is subject to constitutional attack on the ground that the facts no longer exist; in ruling upon such a challenge a court must, of course, be free to re-examine the factual declaration.”
*90When courts apply the traditional equal protection analysis espoused by the majority and frequently applied by our court, the result is inevitably that no judicial review of the legislative action is granted. This may be wise in the majority of cases as legislative classifications cannot be drawn with absolute precision and play must be allowed for the joints of the legislative machine. “ [L]egislatures are ultimate guardians of the liberties and welfare of the people in quite as great a degree as the courts.” Missouri, K. & T. Ry. v. May, 194 U.S. 267, 270, 48 L. Ed. 971, 24 S. Ct. 638 (1904). The challenge is for courts to recognize this and still reserve to themselves, where warranted, the exercise of their responsibilities as independent guarantors of the equal protection of the laws. The application of these two necessary, but sometimes conflicting rules, is certainly far from clear here and the change in conditions is not absolute but a matter of degree. I would hold, however, in light of the changing legal and social reasons since the statute’s first enactment, that the classifications still existing in the statute are irrationally and inherently overbroad and underinclusive as stated in the dissent and the cases there cited. As such, there are grounds for finding a violation of the equal protection clause whether the traditional or invigorated tests are used to measure a violation of that clause.