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840
OCTOBER TERM, 1984
Marshall, J., concurring in judgment
470 U. S.


Justice Marshall, concurring in the judgment.

Easy cases at times produce bad law, for in the rush to reach a clearly ordained result, courts may offer up principles, doctrines, and statements that calmer reflection, and a fuller understanding of their implications in concrete settings, would eschew. In my view, the "presumption of unreviewability" announced today is a product of that lack of discipline that easy cases make all too easy. The majority, eager to reverse what it goes out of its way to label as an "implausible result," ante, at 827, not only does reverse, as I agree it should, but along the way creates out of whole cloth the notion that agency decisions not to take "enforcement action" are unreviewable unless Congress has rather specifically indicated otherwise. Because this "presumption of unreviewability" is fundamentally at odds with rule-of-law principles firmly embedded in our jurisprudence, because it seeks to truncate an emerging line of judicial authority subjecting enforcement discretion to rational and principled constraint, and because, in the end, the presumption may well be indecipherable, one can only hope that it will come to be understood as a relic of a particular factual setting in which the full implications of such a presumption were neither confronted nor understood.

I write separately to argue for a different basis of decision: that refusals to enforce, like other agency actions, are reviewable in the absence of a "clear and convincing" congressional intent to the contrary, but that such refusals warrant deference when, as in this case, there is nothing to suggest


    ments, see Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U. S. 153, 227 (1976) (Brennan, J., dissenting). My concurrence here should not be misread as an expression of approval for the use of lethal injections to effect capital punishment as an independent matter. The Court is correct, however, that "profound differences of opinion over the meaning of the Eighth Amendment" should not influence our consideration of a question purely of statutory administrative law. Ante, at 838.