Court Opinion

ID: 9480485
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:49:18.50412+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:43.203301
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I dissent. I agree with appellant Gibson. His position is stated by the majority (at 629): “[Gibson’s] primary contention is that the Supreme Court cases in this area require an advance deduction rather than a refund.” In affirming the district court on this point, the majority fails to follow the precedent of Gibson I1, which held:
The Abood court concluded that a union may not spend compelled fees for the advancement of political views or ideological causes that are not incidental to the union’s role as bargaining unit.... Stated another way, “Abood held that employees may not be compelled to support a union’s ideological activities unrelated to collective bargaining. The basis for the holding that associational rights were infringed was the compulsory collection of dues from dissenting employees.”
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The similarities between union dues and integrated bar dues are so substantial that we may safely transpose the Abood holding to the facts presented in this appeal as follows: the Florida Bar may use compulsory Bar dues to finance its Legislative Program only to the extent that it assumes a political or ideological position on matters that are germane to the Bar’s stated purposes. (Emphasis added.)
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The proper focus in this action should be upon the actual results of the Bar’s Legislative Program, i.e., whether past positions of the Bar were sufficiently related to its purpose of improving the administration of justice. On this issue, the Bar bears the burden of proving that its expenditures were constitutionally justified. (Emphasis added.)
Gibson I, 798 F.2d at 1567-69 (citations omitted). There is no dispute about the fact that the Bar has never established that “its expenditures were constitutionally justified.”
The majority simply misreads Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson.2 The panel says, “The union also established procedures for handling nonmembers’ objections about the deductions.” (at 629). The panel compares the procedure there to the procedure in the Florida Bar rule. The panel overlooks that the nonmembers in Chicago Teachers were only paying 95% of the union dues as a consequence of the union making advance deductions for activities not germane to pure union objectives. As described in Chicago Teachers, 475 U.S. at 295, 106 S.Ct. at 1070, the union identified expenditures unrelated to collective bargaining and contract administration for the past year and found them to be approximately 5%.
The union in Chicago Teachers did exactly what appellant Gibson is asking our court to require the Bar to do in this case. It deducted in advance that portion of the dues allocable to those expenditures it acknowledged to be unrelated to collective bargaining and contract administration. The union then went on to establish a procedure where nonmembers could object to expenditures by the union of payments from any part of the 95% used toward legislative and political activities which were nevertheless still anathema to those nonmembers. The panel adopts this latter procedure without requiring the Bar to deduct in advance that part of Gibson’s dues which can be approximated from experience to be allocable to non-administration of justice lobbying activities.3
*634Such “non-administration of justice” lobbying was identified in note 1 of Gibson I as positions that had been taken by the Florida Bar in the past: “(1) opposed tort reform; (2) opposed limitation of damages in medical malpractice actions; (3) opposed changes in the state sales tax; (4) opposed changes in the state’s taxation and venue powers; and (5) advocated regulation of child care centers.” Id. at 1565 n. 1.
The panel in note 4 of Gibson I identified as acceptable areas for Bar lobbying to be: “(1) questions concerning the regulation of attorneys; (2) budget appropriations for the judiciary and legal aid; (3) proposed changes in litigation procedures; (4) regulation of attorneys’ client trust accounts; and (5) law school and Bar admission standards.” Id. at 1569 n. 4. It is the law of the case that the Bar has in the past expended members’ dues for lobbying activities unrelated to the administration of justice. Gibson won his case before the first panel and loses here by not being afforded a remedy. He is entitled to the same relief allowed to the plaintiffs in Abood, Chicago Teachers, and Ellis.
In Chicago Teachers, the Supreme Court opens with this quotation:
In Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, 431 U.S. 209, 97 S.Ct. 1782, 52 L.Ed.2d 261 (1977), “we found no constitutional barrier to an agency shop agreement between a municipality and a teacher’s union insofar as the agreement required every employee in the unit to pay a service fee to defray the costs of collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment. The union, however, could not, consistently with the Constitution, collect from dissenting employees any sums for the support of ideological causes not germane to its duties as collective-bargaining agent.” Ellis v. Railway Clerks, 466 U.S. 435, 447, 104 S.Ct. 1883, 1892, 80 L.Ed.2d 428 (1984). (Emphasis added.)
475 U.S. at 294, 106 S.Ct. at 1069, 89 L.Ed.2d at 239. By permitting the Florida Bar to collect dues from the dissenter Gibson and then requiring him to notify the Bar of those individual lobbying activities to which he objects,4 the majority pays little or no attention to Supreme Court authority and our prior panel opinion.
The majority also misapplies Ellis v. Railway Clerks, 466 U.S. 435, 104 S.Ct. 1883, 80 L.Ed.2d 428 (1984). The majority quotes the Supreme Court as invalidating a “pure rebate approach” but noted the existence of “readily available alternatives, such as advance reduction of dues and/or inter*635est-bearing escrow accounts.” (at 631). But the Court went on to say, “Given the existence of acceptable alternatives, the union cannot be allowed to commit dissenters’ funds to improper uses even temporarily,” Ellis, 466 U.S. at 444, 104 S.Ct. at 1890, 80 L.Ed.2d at 439. The Bar plan is a pure rebate plan which places the burden of proving the impropriety of the Bar’s expenditure upon the member and uses Gibson’s dues until he complains. These features of the Bar’s plan have been declared unconstitutional in several Supreme Court cases.
For the foregoing reasons, I dissent.

. Gibson v. The Florida Bar, 798 F.2d 1564 (11th Cir.1986).

. 475 U.S. 292, 106 S.Ct. 1066, 89 L.Ed.2d 232 (1986).

.The majority accepts the Bar’s argument "that advance deductions would not be feasible” because the Bar claims it “does not yet know what political activity it will undertake in the coming year.” This is rebutted in the Court’s recent *634opinion in Keller v. State Bar of California, - U.S. -, 110 S.Ct. 2228, 110 L.Ed.2d 1 (1990). The Court specifically states it is in agreement with Justice Kaufman's dissent in the California Supreme Court case where he said:
Since the bar already is statutorily required to submit detailed budgets to the Legislature pri- or to obtaining approval for setting members’ annual dues (Bus. and Prof.Code § 6140.1), the argument that the constitutionally mandated procedures would create ‘an extraordinary burden’ for the bar is unpersuasive. ‘While such a procedure would likely result in some additional administrative burden to the bar and perhaps prove at times to be somewhat inconvenient, such additional burden or inconvenience is hardly sufficient to justify contravention of the constitutional mandate. It is noteworthy that unions representing government employees have developed, and have operated successfully within the parameters of Abood procedures for over a decade.' [47 Cal.3d 1152, 255 Cal.Rptr. 542, 568] 767 P.2d 1020, 1046. (Emphasis added.)

. The majority rejects Gibson’s First Amendment claim that he should not be required to identify on an issue-by-issue basis those political positions to which he objects. Again the majority ignores Abood which holds:
But in holding that as a prerequisite to any relief each appellant must indicate to the Union the specific expenditures to which he objects, the Court of Appeals ignored the clear holding of [Railway Clerks v.] Allen [373 U.S. 113, 83 S.Ct. 1158, 10 L.Ed.2d 235 (1963) ]. As in Allen, the employees here indicated in their pleadings that they opposed ideological expenditures of any sort that are unrelated to collective bargaining. To require greater specificity would confront an individual employee with the dilemma of relinquishing either his right to withhold his support of ideological causes to which he objects or his freedom to maintain his own beliefs without public disclosure. It would also place on each employee the considerable burden of monitoring all of the numerous and shifting expenditures made by the Union that are unrelated to its duties as exclusive bargaining representative.
97 S.Ct. at 1802-03 (emphasis in original; footnote omitted).