Court Opinion

ID: 9427109
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:19:45.195799+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:04.900229
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Marshall,
with whom Mr. Justice Brennan and Mr. Justice Stevens join, dissenting.
Almost a century ago, in the landmark case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356, 369 (1886), this Court recognized that aliens are "persons” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Eighty-five years later, in Graham v. Richardson, 403 U. S. 365 (1971), the Court concluded that aliens constitute a “ 'discrete and insular’ minority,” and that laws singling them out for unfavorable treatment "are therefore subject to strict judicial scrutiny.” Id., at 372, 376. During the ensuing six Terms, we have invalidated state laws discriminating against aliens on four separate occasions, finding *303that such discrimination could not survive strict scrutiny. Sugarman v. Dougall, 413 U. S. 634 (1973) (competitive civil service); In re Griffiths, 413 U. S. 717 (1973) (attorneys); Examining Board v. Flores de Otero, 426 U. S. 572 (1976) (civil engineers); Nyquist v. Mauclet, 432 U. S. 1 (1977) (financial assistance for higher education).
Today the Court upholds a law excluding aliens from public employment as state troopers. It bases its decision largely on dictum from Sugarman v. Dougall, supra, to the effect that aliens may be barred from holding “state elective or important nonelective executive, legislative, and judicial positions,” because persons in these positions “participate directly in the formulation, execution, or review of broad public policy.” 413 U. S., at 647.1 I do not agree with the Court that state troopers perform functions placing them within this “narro [w] . . . exception,” Nyquist v. Mauclet, supra, at 11, to our usual rule that discrimination against aliens is presumptively unconstitutional. Accordingly I dissent.
In one sense, of course, it is true that state troopers participate in the execution of public policy. Just as firefighters *304execute the public policy that fires should be extinguished, and sanitation workers execute the public policy that streets should be kept clean, state troopers execute the public policy that persons believed to have committed crimes should be arrested. But this fact simply demonstrates that the Sugarman exception, if read without regard to its context, “would swallow the rule.” Nyquist, supra, at 11. Although every state employee is charged with the “execution” of public policy, Sugarman unambiguously holds that a blanket exclusion of aliens from state jobs is unconstitutional.
Thus the phrase “execution of broad public policy” in Sugarman cannot be read to mean simply the carrying out of government programs, but rather must be interpreted to include responsibility for actually setting government policy pursuant to a delegation of substantial authority from the legislature. The head of an executive agency, for example, charged with promulgating complex regulations under a statute, executes broad public policy in a sense that file clerks in the agency clearly do not. In short, as Sugarman indicates, those “elective or important nonelective” positions that involve broad policymaking responsibilities are the only state jobs from which aliens as a group may constitutionally be excluded. 413 U. S., at 647. In my view, the job of state trooper is not one of those positions.
There is a vast difference between the formulation and execution of broad public policy and the application of that policy to specific factual settings. While the Court is correct that “the exercise of police authority calls for a very high degree of judgment and discretion,” ante, at 298, the judgments required are factual in nature; the policy judgments that govern an officer’s conduct are contained in the Federal and State Constitutions, statutes, and regulations.2 The officer *305responding to a particular situation is only applying the basic policy choices — which he has no role in shaping — to the facts as he perceives them.3 We have previously recognized this distinction between the broad policy responsibilities exercised by high executive officials and the more limited responsibilities of police officers and found it relevant in defining the scope of immunity afforded under 42 U. S. C. § 1983:
“When a court evaluates police conduct relating to an arrest its guideline is ‘good faith and probable cause.’ In the case of higher officers of the executive branch, however, the inquiry is far more complex since the range of decisions and choices — whether the formulation of policy, of legislation, of budgets, or of day-to-day decisions — is virtually infinite. . . . [S]ince the options which a chief executive and his principal subordinates must consider are far broader and far more subtle than those made by officials with less responsibility, the range of discretion must be comparably broad.” Scheuer v. Rhodes, 416 U. S. 232, 245-247 (1974) (citation omitted).
The Court places great reliance on the fact that policemen make arrests and perform searches, often “without prior judicial authority.” Ante, at 298. I certainly agree that “[an] arrest is a serious matter,” ibid., and that we should be *306concerned about all “intrusions] on the privacy of the individual.” Ibid. But these concerns do not in any way make it “anomalous” for citizens to be arrested and searched by “noncitizen police officers,” ante, at 299, at least not in New York State. By statute, New York authorizes “any person” to arrest another who has actually committed a felony or who has committed any other offense in the arresting person’s presence. N. Y. Crim. Proc. Law § 140.30 (McKinney 1971). Moreover, a person making an arrest pursuant to this statute is authorized to make a search incident to the arrest.4 While law enforcement is primarily the responsibility of state troopers, it is nevertheless difficult to understand how the Court can imply that the troopers’ arrest and search authority justifies excluding aliens from the police force when the State has given all private persons, including aliens, such authority.
In Griffiths we held that the State could not limit the practice of law to citizens, “despite a recognition of the vital public and political role of attorneys,” Nyquist v. Mauclet, 432 U. S., at 11. It is similarly not a denigration of the important public role of the state trooper — who, as the Court notes, ante, at 297, operates “in the most sensitive areas of daily life”- — to find that his law enforcement responsibilities do not “make him a. formulator of government policy.” In re Griffiths, 413 U. S., at 729. Since no other rational reason, let alone a compelling state interest, has been advanced in sup*307port of the statute here at issue,51 would hold that the statute’s exclusion of aliens from state trooper positions violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

 In Sugarman, the Court indicated that, if the State were to exclude aliens from these positions, the exclusion would be scrutinized under a standard less demanding than that normally accorded classifications involving a “ ‘discrete and insular’ minority.” 413 U. S., at 642. The Court did not explain why the level of scrutiny should vary with the nature of the job from which aliens are being excluded, and the focus of this part of the opinion was on the State’s interest in preserving “ ‘the basic conception of a political community.’ ” Ibid., quoting Dunn v. Blumslein, 405 U. S. 330, 344 (1972); see 413 U. S., at 647-648. Sugarman may thus be viewed as defining the circumstances under which laws .excluding aliens from state jobs would further a compelling state interest, rather than as defining the circumstances under which lesser scrutiny is applicable. Regardless of which approach is followed, however, the question in this case remains the same: Is the job of state trooper a position involving direct participation “in the formulation, execution, or review of broad public policy”?

 If the state exclusion here were limited to the job of Superintendent of the State Police, a different case would be presented to the extent that *305this official executes broad public policy in deciding how to deploy officers and in formulating rules governing police conduct.

 This view of the differences between those who apply policy and those with policymaking responsibilities was rejected by Mr. Justice Rehnquist in his lone dissenting opinion in Sugarman. His position was that “ ‘low level' civil servants . . . who apply facts to individual cases are as much ‘governors' as those who write the laws or regulations the ‘low-level' administrator must ‘apply.' " 413 U. S., at 661. The eight-Justice Sugarman majority, in holding as it did, necessarily took the opposite position: that those “who apply facts to individual cases" do not have responsibility for broad policy execution that is in any way comparable to the responsibility exercised by “those who write the laws or regulations."

 See United States v. Rosse, 418 F. 2d 38, 39-40 (CA2 1969); United States v. Viale, 312 F. 2d 595, 599, 600 (CA2 1963). Although many of the cases discussing the right of a private individual to make arrests and searches refer to a “citizen” taking the action, see United States v. Swarovski, 557 F. 2d 40 (CA2 1977), cert. denied, 434 U. S. 1045 (1978); United States v. Rosse, supra, at 39; United States v. Viale, supra, it is clear from the context and from the plain language of the statutory provision that the right to arrest is not limited to citizens but applies to “any person.”

 One other justification for the statute was proffered by the appellee, see App. D-30 (affidavit of Superintendent of State Police), and accepted by the court below:
“The state quite rightly observes that conflicts of allegiance would be most glaring with respect to the alien’s duty as a state policeman to make arrests of violators of the federal immigration laws, to participate in the Governor’s Detail which provides protection for the Governor and visiting foreign dignitaries, to conduct investigations into matters having to do with government security, and to provide security at events involving foreign visitors such as the 1980 Winter Olympics to be held in Lake Placid, New York.” 419 F. Supp. 889, 898 (SDNY 1976).
Not surprisingly, the appellee does not rely on this argument in his brief here, and the Court does not mention it. The suggestion that alien troopers would refuse to enforce the law against other aliens is highly offensive. This rationale would justify the State’s refusal to hire members of any group on the basis that the individuals could not be trusted to faithfully enforce the law against other members of their race, nationality, or sex. I would have thought that the day had long since passed when a court would accept such a justification for exclusion of a group from public employment.