Court Opinion

ID: 9489519
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:17:41.755398+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:34.463256
License: Public Domain

RIPPLE, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join the judgment of the court and agree with much of what Judge Bauer has said in his fine opinion. I write separately because a note of caution is necessary with respect to two aspects of today’s holding.
1.
Courts ought to tread cautiously when asked to apply the Eleventh Amendment to state bars. The present case is a relatively easy one, but others well may be less clear-cut. Here, there can be little question that, in promulgating the rule in question, the Wisconsin State Bar was acting as an arm of state government and therefore enjoys the protection of the Amendment. As the court notes, and as the cases collected in our earlier opinion in Crosetto v. State Bar of Wisconsin, 12 F.3d 1396, 1401-02 (7th Cir.1993), *406cert. denied, — U.S. -, 114 S.Ct. 2138, 128 L.Ed.2d 867 (1994), amply demonstrate, there is unanimity among the circuits that have been required to rule on this point. I do not understand the court to hold today, however, that the same result would necessarily obtain if the activity of the bar were of a different nature in which the governmental function was not as readily identifiable. As Chief Justice Rehnquist noted in Keller v. State Bar of California, 496 U.S. 1, 110 S.Ct. 2228, 110 L.Ed.2d 1 (1990), characterizing a state bar as a “governmental agency” is an analogy not without its limitations. Id. at 11-12, 110 S.Ct. at 2234-35. State bars can be “a good deal different from most other entities that would be regarded in common parlance as ‘governmental agencies.’ ” Id. at 11, 110 S.Ct. at 2234. They not only participate in the process of governance of the profession, but also play a role substantially analogous to that of a union for its members. Id. at 12, 110 S.Ct. at 2235. In this latter capacity, their governmental character is not as obvious and ought to be examined critically before the absolute shield of Eleventh Amendment immunity is cast around its activities.
2.
The multi-faceted nature of bar activities also ought to signal caution when we are asked to identify those activities for which it is permissible to use obligatory dues. With respect to this issue, this case again presents us with a relatively straightforward situation that does not present the complications that other bar association activities might present and upon which the guidance of the Supreme Court is not yet clear. Here, all of the activities of which the plaintiffs complain fit quite comfortably within the category of non-ideological, nonpolitical activities that are germane to the regulation of the legal profession or the improvement of the quality of legal services. Like the Supreme Court in Keller v. State Bar of California, 496 U.S. 1, 110 S.Ct. 2228, 110 L.Ed.2d 1 (1990), we are not confronted here with a situation in which the bar can be said to be engaging in nonpolitical, non-ideological activities that are also completely divorced from those statutory purposes that justify mandatory dues. Therefore, we need not decide whether attorneys dissenting from the use of their dues for such purposes have the right to distinctive procedural remedies to ensure that their funds are not used for such a purpose. To suggest that this issue has been resolved by the Supreme Court, however, requires that we ask its footnote in Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson, 475 U.S. 292, 304 n. 13, 106 S.Ct. 1066, 1074 n. 13, 89 L.Ed.2d 232 (1986), to bear far too much weight. Certainly, the same procedural protections that ferret out activities of an ideological and political nature will also identify nongermane activities that are not ideological or political. But that does not mean necessarily that such nongermane activities need not be identified or that they can be supported by mandatory dues. Until the Supreme Court speaks more definitively, all we can say, and all we need say in this case, is that we ought not give the term “germane” a crabbed reading. Like a union, a bar association must have “a certain flexibility in its use of compelled funds.” Ellis v. Brotherhood of Ry., Airline and S.S. Clerks, Freight Handlers, Express and Station Employees, 466 U.S. 435, 456, 104 S.Ct. 1883, 1896, 80 L.Ed.2d 428 (1984).
I join the judgment of the court.