Court Opinion

ID: 9426442
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:17:57.866893+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:00.876216
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice White,
with whom Mr. Justice Brennan, Mr. Justice Marshall, and Mr. Justice Black-mun join, dissenting.
I dissent because the decision of the majority rests upon a proposition which was squarely addressed and in my view correctly rejected by six Members of this Court in Arnett v. Kennedy, 416 U. S. 134 (1974).
Petitioner Bishop was a permanent employee of the Police Department of the city of Marion, N. C. The city ordinance applicable to him provides:
“Dismissal. A permanent employee whose work is not satisfactory over a period of time shall be notified in what way his work is deficient and what he must do if his work is to be satisfactory. If a permanent employee fails to perform work up to the standard of the classification held, or continues to be negligent, inefficient, or unfit to perform his duties, he may be dismissed by the City Manager. Any discharged employee shall be given written notice of his discharge setting forth the effective date and reasons for his discharge if he shall request such a notice.” (Emphasis added.)
The second sentence of this ordinance plainly conditions petitioner’s dismissal on cause — i. e., failure to perform up to standard, negligence, inefficiency, or unfitness to perform the job. The District Court below did not otherwise construe this portion of the ordinance. In the only part of its opinion rejecting petitioner’s claim that the ordinance gave him a property interest in his job, *356the District Court said, in an opinion predating this Court's decision in Arnett v. Kennedy, supra:
“It is clear from Article II, Section 6, of the City's Personnel Ordinance, that the dismissal of an employee does not require a notice or a hearing. Upon request of the discharged employee, he shall be given written notice of his discharge setting forth the effective date and the reasons for the discharge. It thus appears that both the city ordinance and the state law have been complied with.” 377 F. Supp. 501, 504 (WDNC 1973).
Thus in concluding that petitioner had no “property interest” in his job entitling him to a hearing on discharge and that he held his position “at the will and pleasure of the city,” ibid., the District Court relied on the fact that the ordinance described its own procedures for determining cause, which procedures did not include a hearing. The majority purports, ante, at 345, and n. 8, to read the District Court’s opinion as construing the ordinance not to condition dismissal on cause, and, if this is what the majority means, its reading of the District Court’s opinion is clearly erroneous for the reasons just stated.1 However, later in its opinion the majority ap*357pears to eschew this construction of the District Court’s opinion and of the ordinance. In the concluding paragraph of its discussion of petitioner’s property interest, the majority holds that since neither the ordinance nor state law provides for a hearing, or any kind of review of the City Manager’s dismissal decision, petitioner had no enforceable property interest in his job. The majority concludes:
“In this case, as the District Court construed the ordinance, the City Manager’s determination of the adequacy of the grounds for discharge is not subject to judicial review; the employee is merely given certain procedural rights which the District Court found not to have been violated in this case. The District Court’s reading of the ordinance is tenable . . . .” Ante, at 347. (Emphasis added.)
The majority thus implicitly concedes that the ordinance supplies the “grounds” for discharge and that the City Manager must determine them to be “adequate” before he may fire an employee. The majority’s holding that petitioner had no property interest in his job in spite of the unequivocal language in the city ordinance that he may be dismissed only for certain kinds of cause rests, then, on the fact that state law provides no procedures for assuring that the City Manager dismiss him only for cause. The right to his job apparently given by the first two sentences of the ordinance is thus redefined, according to the majority, by the procedures provided for in the third sentence and as redefined is infringed only if the procedures are not followed.
This is precisely the reasoning which was embraced by only three and expressly rejected by six Members of this Court in Arnett v. Kennedy, supra. There a federal employee had “a statutory expectancy that he not be removed other than for 'such cause as will promote *358the efficiency of [the] service.’ ” 416 U. S., at 151-152 (opinion of Rehnquist, J., joined by Burger, C. J., and Stewart, J.). The three Justices whose views were rejected by a majority of the Court went on to say:
“But the very section of the statute which granted him that right . . . expressly provided also for the procedure by which ‘cause’ was to be determined, and expressly omitted the procedural guarantees which appellee insists are mandated by the Constitution. Only by bifurcating the very sentence of the Act of Congress which conferred upon appellee the right not to be removed save for cause could it be said that he had an expectancy of that substantive right without the procedural limitations which Congress attached to it. . . .” Id., at 152.
The three Justices went on:
“Here the property interest which appellee had in his employment was itself conditioned by the procedural limitations which had accompanied the grant of that interest. . . .” Id., at 155.
Accordingly they concluded that the Constitution imposed no independent procedural requirements.
This view was rejected by Mr. Justice Powell in an opinion joined by Mr. Justice Blackmun.
“The plurality opinion evidently reasons that the nature of appellee’s interest in continued federal employment is necessarily defined and limited by the statutory procedures for discharge and that the constitutional guarantee of procedural due process accords to appellee no procedural protections against arbitrary or erroneous discharge other than those expressly provided in the statute. The plurality would thus conclude that the statute governing federal employment determines not only the nature of appellee’s property interest, but also the extent of *359the procedural protections to which he may lay claim. It seems to me that this approach is incompatible with the principles laid down in Roth and Sindermann. Indeed, it would lead directly to the conclusion that whatever the nature of an individual’s statutorily created property interest, deprivation of that interest could be accomplished without notice or a hearing at any time. This view misconceives the origin of the right to procedural due process. That right is conferred, not by legislative grace, but by constitutional guarantee. While the legislature may elect not to confer a property interest in federal employment, it may not constitutionally authorize the deprivation of such an interest, once conferred, without appropriate procedural safeguards. . . .” Id., at 166-167. (Emphasis added.)
I, too, disagreed with the view stated in Mr. Justice Rehnquist’s opinion:
“I differ basically with the plurality’s view that 'where the grant of a substantive right is inextricably intertwined with the limitations on the procedures which are to be employed in determining that right, a litigant in the position of appellee must take the bitter with the sweet,’ and that 'the property interest which appellee had in his employment was itself conditioned by the procedural limitations which had accompanied the grant of that interest.’ Ante, at 153-154, 155. The rationale of this position quickly leads to the conclusion that even though the statute requires cause for discharge, the requisites of due process could equally have been satisfied had the law dispensed with any hearing at all, whether pretermination or post-termination.” Id., at 177-178.
*360The view was also rejected by Mr. Justice Marshall in an opinion joined by Mr. Justice Brennan and Mr. Justice Douglas in which it was correctly observed:
“Accordingly, a majority of the Court rejects Mr. Justice Rehnquist’s argument that because ap-pellee’s entitlement arose from statute, it could be conditioned on a statutory limitation of procedural due process protections, an approach which would render such protection inapplicable to the deprivation of any statutory benefit — any 'privilege’ extended by Government — where a statute prescribed a termination procedure, no matter how arbitrary or unfair. It would amount to nothing less than a return, albeit in somewhat different verbal garb, to the thoroughly discredited distinction between rights and privileges which once seemed to govern the applicability of procedural due process.” Id., at 211.
The views now expressed by the majority are thus squarely contrary to the views expressed by a majority of the Justices in Arnett. As Mr. Justice Powell suggested in Arnett, they are also “incompatible with the principles laid down in Roth and Sindermann.” 2 Id., at 166. I would not so soon depart from these cases nor from the views expressed by a majority in Arnett. The ordinance plainly grants petitioner a right to his job unless there is cause to fire him. Having granted him such a right it is the Federal Constitution,3 *361not state law, which determines the process to be applied in connection with any state decision to deprive him of it.

 The Court accepts the District Court’s conclusion that the city employee holds his position at the will and pleasure of the city. If the Court believes that the District Court’s conclusion did not rest on the procedural limitations in the ordinance, then the Court must construe the District Court’s opinion — and the ordinance — as permitting, but not limiting, discharges to those based on the causes specified in the ordinance. In this view, discharges for other reasons or for no reason at all could be made. Termination of employment would in effect be within the complete discretion of the city; and for this reason the employee would have no property interest in his employment which would call for the protections of the Due Process Clause. As indicated in the text, I think this construction of the ordinance and of the District Court’s opinion is in error.

 Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U. S. 564 (1972), and Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U. S. 593 (1972).

 The majority intimates, ante, at 345 n. 8, that the views of the three plurality Justices in Arnett v. Kennedy were rejected because the other six Justices disagreed on the question of how the federal statute involved in that case should be construed. This is incorrect. All Justices agreed on the meaning of the statute. As the remarks of the six Justices quoted above indicate, it was the constitutional *361significance of the statute on which the six disagreed with the plurality.
Similarly, here, I do not disagree with the majority or the courts below on the meaning of the state law. If I did, I might be inclined to defer to the judgments of the two lower courts. The state law says that petitioner may be dismissed by the City Manager only for certain kinds of cause and then provides that he will receive notice and an explanation, but no hearing and no review. I agree that as a matter of state law petitioner has no remedy no matter how arbitrarily or erroneously the City Manager has acted. This is what the lower courts say the statute means. I differ with those courts and the majority only with respect to the constitutional significance of an unambiguous state law. A majority of the Justices in Arnett v. Kennedy, stood on the proposition that the Constitution requires procedures not required by state law when the state conditions dismissal on “cause.”