Adler v. Board of Education/Dissent Frankfurter

by Felix Frankfurter

United States Supreme Court

342 U.S. 485

Adler  v.  Board of Education

 Argued: Jan. 3, 1952. --- Decided: March 3, 1952

Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER, dissenting.

We are asked to pass on a scheme to counteract what are currently called 'subversive' influences in the public school system of New York. The scheme is formulated partly in statutes and partly in administrative regulations, but all of it is still an unfinished blueprint. We are asked to adjudicate claims against its constitutionality before the scheme has been put into operation, before the limits that it imposes upon free inquiry and association, the scope of scrutiny that it sanctions, and the procedural safeguards that will be found to be implied for its enforcement have been authoritatively defined. I think we should adhere to the teaching of this Court's history to avoid constitutional adjudications on merely abstract or speculative issues and to base them on the concreteness afforded by an actual, present, defined controversy, appropriate for judicial judgment, between adversaries immediately affected by it. In accordance with the settled limits upon our jurisdiction I would dismiss this appeal.

An understanding of the statutory scheme and the action thus far taken under it is necessary to a proper consideration of the issues which for me control disposition of the case, namely, standing of the parties and ripeness of the constitutional question.

A New York enactment of 1949 precipitated this litigation. But that legislation is tied to prior statutes. By a law of 1917 'treasonable or seditious' utterances or acts barred employment in the public schools. New York Education Law, § 3021. In 1939 a further enactment disqualified from the civil service and the educational system anyone who advocates the overthrow of government by force, violence or any unlawful means, or publishes material advocating such overthrow or organizes or joins any society advocating such doctrine. New York Civil Service Law, § 12 a. This states with sufficient accuracy the provisions of this Law, which also included detailed provisions for the hearing and review of charges.

During the thirty-two years and ten years, respectively, that these laws have stood on the books, no proceedings, so far as appears, have been taken under them. In 1949 the Legislature passed a new act, familiarly known as the Feinberg Law, designed to reinforce the prior legislation. The Law begins with a legislative finding, based on 'common report' of widespread infiltration by 'members of subversive groups, and particularly of the communist party and certain of its affiliated organizations,' into the educational system of the State and the evils attendant upon that infiltration. It takes note of existing laws and exhorts the authorities to greater endeavor of enforcement. The State Board of Regents, in which are lodged extensive powers over New York's educational system, was charged by the Feinberg Law with these duties:

(1) to promulgate rules and regulations for the more stringent enforcement of existing law;

(2) to list 'after inquiry, and after such notice and hearing as may be appropriate' those organizations membership in which is proscribed by subsection (c) of § 12-a of the Civil Service law;

(3) to provide in its rules and regulations that membership in a listed organization shall be prima facie evidence of disqualification under § 12-a;

(4) to report specially and in detail to the legislature each year on measures taken for the enforcement of these laws.

Accordingly, the Board of Regents adopted Rules for ferreting out violations of § 3021 or § 12-a. An elaborate machinery was designed for annual reports on each employee with a view to discovering evidence of violations of these sections and to assuring appropriate action on such discovery. The Board also announced its intention to publish the required list of proscribed organizations and defined the significance of an employee's membership therein in proceedings for his dismissal. These Rules by the Board of Regents were published with an accompanying Memorandum by the Commissioner of Education. He is the administrative head of New York's school system and his Memorandum was for the guidance of school officials throughout the State. It warned of the danger of indiscriminate or careless action under the Feinberg Law and the Regents' Rules, and laid down this duty: 'The statutes and the Regents' rules make it clear that it is a primary duty of the school authorities in each school district to take positive action to eliminate from the school system any teacher in whose case there is evidence that he is guilty of subversive activity. School authorities are under obligation to proceed immediately and conclusively in every such case.'

The Rules and Memorandum appear in the record; we shall have occasion to refer later to their relevance to what was decided below. Our attention has also been called to an order of the Board of Education of the City of New York, the present appellee. This order further elaborates the part of the Regents' Rules dealing with reports on teachers. It is not clear whether this order has gone into effect. In any event it was not before the lower courts and is not in the record here.

It thus appears that we are asked to review a complicated statutory scheme prohibiting those who engage in the kind of speech or conduct that is proscribed from holding positions in the public school system. The scheme is aligned with a complex system of enforcement by administrative investigation, reporting and listing of proscribed organizations. All this must further be related to the general procedures under the New York law for hearing and reviewing charges of misconduct against educational employees, modified as those procedures may be by the Feinberg Law and the Regents' Rules.

This intricate machinery has not yet been set in motion. Enforcement has been in abeyance since the present suit, among others, was brought to enjoin the Board of Education from taking steps or spending funds under the statutes and Rules on the theory that these transgressed various limitations which the United States Constitution places on the power of the States. The case comes here on the bare bones of the Feinberg Law only partly given flesh by the Regents' Rules. It was decided wholly on pleadings: a complaint, identifying the plaintiffs and their interests, setting out the offending statutes and Rules, and concluding in a more or less argumentative fashion that these provisions violate numerous constitutional rights of the various plaintiffs; an answer, denying that the impact of the statute is unconstitutional and that the plaintiffs have any interest to support the suit. On these pleadings summary judgment in favor of some of the plaintiffs was granted by the Supreme Court in Kings County, Lederman v. Board of Education, 196 Misc. 873, 95 N.Y.S.2d 114; this was reversed by the Appellate Division for the Second Department with direction that the complaint be dismissed, 276 App.Div. 527, 96 N.Y.S.2d 466, and the Court of Appeals affirmed the Appellate Division. 301 N.Y. 476, 95 N.E.2d 806. These pleadings and the opinions below are the basis on which we are asked to decide this case.

About forty plaintiffs brought the action initially; the trial court dismissed as to all but eight. 196 Misc. at page 877, 95 N.Y.S.2d 114. The others were found without standing to sue under New York law. The eight who are here as appellants alleged that they were municipal taxpayers and were empowered, by virtue of N.Y.Gen.Municipal Law § 51, McK.Consol.Laws, c. 24, to bring suit against municipal agencies to enjoin waste of funds. New York is free to determine how the views of its courts on matters of constitutionality are to be invoked. But its action cannot of course confer jurisdiction on this Court, limited as that is by the settled construction of Article III of the Constitution. We cannot entertain, as we again recognize this very day, a constitutional claim at the instance of one whose interest has no material significance and is undifferentiated from the mass of his fellow citizens. Doremus v. Board of Education, 342 U.S. 429, 72 S.Ct. 394. This is not a 'pocketbook action.' As taxpayers these plaintiffs cannot possibly be affected one way or the other by any disposition of this case, and they make no such claim. It may well be that the authorities will, if left free, divert funds and effort from other purposes for the enforcement of the provisions under review, though how much leads to the merest conjecture. But the total expenditure, certainly the new expenditure, necessary to implement the Act and Rules may well be de minimis. The plaintiffs at any rate have not attempted to show that any such expenditure would come from funds to which their taxes contribute. In short, they have neither alleged nor shown that our decision on the issues they tender would have the slightest effect on their tax bills or even on the aggregate bill of all the City's taxpayers whom they claim to represent. The high improbability of being able to make such a demonstration, in the circumstances of this case, does not dispense with the requirements for our jurisdiction. If the incidence of taxation in a city like New York bears no relation to the factors here under consideration, that is precisely why these taxpayers have no claim on our jurisdiction.

This ends the matter for plaintiffs Krieger and Newman. But six of the plaintiffs advanced grounds other than that of being taxpayers in bringing this action. Two are parents of children in New York City schools. Four are teachers in these schools. On the basis of the record before us these claims, too, are insufficient, in view of our controlling adjudications, to support the jurisdiction of this Court.

The trial court found the interests of the plaintiffs as parents inconsequential. Lederman v. Board of Education, 196 Misc., at page 875, 95 N.Y.S.2d 114. I agree. Parents may dislike to have children educated in a school system where teachers feel restrained by unconstitutional limitations on their freedom. But it is like catching butterflies without a net to try to find a legal interest, indispensable for our jurisdiction, in a parent's desire to have his child educated in schools free from such restrictions. The hurt to parents' sensibilities is too tenuous or the inroad upon rightful claims to public education too argumentative to serve as the earthy stuff required for a legal right judicially enforceable. The claim does not approach in immediacy or directness or solidity that which our whole process of constitutional adjudication has deemed a necessary condition to the Court's settlement of constitutional issues.

An apt contrast is provided by People of State of Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203, 68 S.Ct. 461, 92 L.Ed. 648, where a parent did present an individualized claim of his own that was direct and palpable. There the parent alleged that Illinois imposed restrictions on the child's free exercise of faith and thereby on the parent's. The basis of jurisdiction in the McCollum case was not at all a parental right to challenge in the courts-or at least in this Court-educational provisions in general. The closely defined encroachment of the particular arrangement on a constitutionally protected right of the child, and of the parent's right in the child, furnished the basis for our review. The Feinberg Law puts no limits on any definable legal interest of the child or of its parents.

This leaves only the teachers, Adler, Spencer, and George and Mark Friedlander. The question whether their interest as teachers was sufficient to give them standing to sue was thought by the trial court to be conclusively settled by our decision in United Public Workers v. Mitchell, 330 U.S. 75, 67 S.Ct. 556, 91 L.Ed. 754. I see no escape from the controlling relevance of the Mitchell case. There individual government employees sought to enjoin enforcement of the provisions of the Hatch Act forbidding government employees to take active part in politics. The complaint contained detailed recitals of the desire, intent and specific steps short of violation on the part of plaintiffs to engage in the prohibited activities. See 330 U.S. at pages 87-88, note 18, 67 S.Ct. 563. There as here the law was attacked as violating constitutional guaranties of freedom of speech. We found jurisdiction wanting to decide the issue except as to one plaintiff whose conduct had already violated the applicable standards.

The allegations in the present action fall short of those found insufficient in the Mitchell case. These teachers do not allege that they have engaged in proscribed conduct or that they have any intention to do so. They do not suggest that they have been, or are, deterred from supporting causes or from joining organizations for fear of the Feinberg Law's interdict, except to say generally that the system complained of will have this effect on teachers as a group. They do not assert that they are threatened with action under the law, or that steps are imminent whereby they would incur the hazard of punishment for conduct innocent at the time, or under standards too vague to satisfy due process of law. They merely allege that the statutes and Rules permit such action against some teachers. Since we rightly refused in the Mitchell case to hear government employees whose conduct was much more intimately affected by the law there attacked than are the claims of plaintiffs here, this suit is wanting in the necessary basis for our review.

This case proves anew the wisdom of rigorous adherence to the prerequisites for pronouncement by this Court on matters of constitutional law. The absence in these plaintiffs of the immediacy and solidity of interest necessary to support jurisdiction is reflected in the atmosphere of abstraction and ambiguity in which the constitutional issues are presented. The broad, generalized claims urged at the bar touch the deepest interests of a democratic society: its right to self-preservation and ample scope for the individual's freedom, especially the teacher's freedom of thought, inquiry and expression. No problem of a free society is probably more difficult than the reconciliation or accommodation of these too often conflicting interests. The judicial role in this process of accommodation is necessarily very limited and must be carefully circumscribed. To that end the Court, in its long history, has developed 'a series of rules' carefully formulated by Mr. Justice Brandeis, 'under which it has avoided passing upon a large part of all the constitutional questions pressed upon it for decision.' Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 297 U.S. 288, 346, 56 S.Ct. 466, 482, 80 L.Ed. 688.

We have emphasized that, as to the kind of constitutional questions raised by the Feinberg Law, 'the distinction is one of degree, and it is for this reason that the effect of the statute in proscribing beliefs-like its effect in restraining speech or freedom of association-must be carefully weighed by the courts in determining whether the balance struck by (the State) comports with the dictates of the Constitution.' American Communications Ass'n v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 409, 70 S.Ct. 674, 689, 94 L.Ed. 925. But as the case comes to us we can have no guide other than our own notions-however uncritically extra-judicial-of the real bearing of the New York arrangement on the freedom of thought and activity, and especially on the feeling of such freedom, which are, as I suppose no one would deny, part of the necessary professional equipment of teachers in a free society. The scheme for protecting the school system from being made the instrument of purposes other than a school system should serve in a free society certainly a concern within the constitutional powers of a State bristles with ambiguities which must enter into any constitutional decision we may make. Of these only a few have been considered by the courts below. We are told that an organization cannot be listed by the Regents except after hearing. Lederman v. Board of Education, 301 N.Y. at pages 488, 493, 494, 95 N.E.2d 806. From this it may be assumed that the hearing contemplated is that found wanting by some members of this Court in Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v. McGrath, 341 U.S. 123, 71 S.Ct. 624, 95 L.Ed. 817. The effect of the requirement that membership in a listed organization be prima facie evidence of disqualification in a dismissal proceeding is enlarged upon. Lederman v. Board of Education, 301 N.Y. at page 494, 95 N.E.2d 806. And the Court of Appeals indicates that only one who 'knowingly holds membership in an organization named upon any listing' is subjected to the operation of that rebuttable presumption. 301 N.Y. at page 494, 95 N.E.2d at page 814.

These are the only islands of clarity. Otherwise we are at sea. We are not told the meaning to be attributed to the words 'treasonable or seditious' in § 3021 of the Education Law, though that is one of the two sections of preexisting law which the elaborate apparatus of the Feinberg Law is designed to enforce. In light of the experience under the Sedition Act of 1798, 1 Stat. 596, 'seditious' can hardly be deemed a self-defining term or a word of art. See Miller, Crisis in Freedom, 136-137. Nor can we turn to practical application or judicial construction for sufficient particularity of the meaning to be attributed to the range of activity proscribed by § 12-a. Concern over the latitude afforded by such phrases as 'the overthrow of government by * * * any unlawful means' when positions of trust or public employment are conditioned upon disbelief in such an objective cannot be deemed without warrant. See American Communications Ass'n, v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 415, 435, 70 S.Ct. 674, 692, 702, 94 L.Ed. 925; Garner v. Board of Public Works of Los Angeles, 341 U.S. 716, 724, 71 S.Ct. 909, 914, 95 L.Ed. 1317. In those cases the Court had ground for limiting the reach of a dubious formula. No such alternative is available here.

These gaps in our understanding of the precise scope of the statutory provisions are deepened by equal uncertainties in the implementing Rules. Indeed, according to the Appellate Division these Rules are not in the case. Lederman v. Board of Education, 276 App.Div. at page 531, 96 N.Y.S.2d 466. And the Court of Appeals was silent on the point. Therefore we are without enlightenment, for example, on the nature of the reporting system described by the Rules. This may be a vital matter, affecting not the special circumstances of a particular case but coloring the whole scheme. For it may well be of constitutional significance whether the reporting system contemplates merely the notation as to each teacher that no evidence of disqualification has turned up, if such be the case, or whether it demands systematic and continuous surveillance and investigation of evidence. The difference cannot be meaningless, it may even be decisive, if our function is to balance the restrictions on freedom of utterance and of association against the evil to be suppressed. Again, the Rules seem to indicate that past activities of the proscribed organizations or past membership in listed organizations may be enough to bar new applicants for employment. But we do not know, nor can we determine it. This, too, may make a difference. See Garner v. Board of Public Works of Los Angeles, supra, 341 U.S. at page 729, 71 S.Ct. 917 (Mr. Justice Burton dissenting in part). We do not know, nor can we ascertain, the effect of the presumption of continuing membership in proscribed organizations that is drawn from evidence of past membership 'in the absence of a showing that such membership has been terminated in good faith.' We are uninformed of the effect in law of the Commissioner's memorandum, and there is no basis on which to appraise its effect in practice. As for the order of the Board of Education of the City of New York, it is not even formally in the case. In the face of such uncertainties this Court has in the past found jurisdiction wanting, howsoever much the litigants were eager for constitutional pronouncements. Alabama State Federation of Labor v. McAdory, 325 U.S. 450, 65 S.Ct. 1384, 89 L.Ed. 1725; Congress of Industrial Organizations v. McAdory, 325 U.S. 472, 65 S.Ct. 1395, 89 L.Ed. 1741; Rescue Army v. Municipal Court, 331 U.S. 549, 67 S.Ct. 1409, 91 L.Ed. 1666; Parker v. County of Los Angeles, 338 U.S. 327, 70 S.Ct. 161, 94 L.Ed. 144.

This statement of reasons for declining jurisdiction sounds technical, perhaps, but the principles concerned are not so. Rare departures from them are regrettable chapters in the Court's history, and in wellknown instances they caused great public misfortune.

Notes