District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman

Justice Stevens,

dissenting.

There are many crafts in which the State performs a licensing function. That function is important, not only to those seeking access to a gainful occupation but to the members of the public served by the profession as well. State-created rules governing the grant or denial of licenses must comply with constitutional standards and must be administered in accordance with due process of law. Given these acknowledged constitutional limitations on action by the State, it should be beyond question that a federal district court has subject-matter jurisdiction over an individual’s lawsuit raising federal constitutional challenges either to licensing rules themselves or to their application in his own case. 1 Curiously, however, the Court today ignores basic jurisdictional principles when it decides a jurisdictional issue affecting the licensing of members of the legal profession.

The Court holds that respondents may make a general constitutional attack on the rules governing the admission of lawyers to practice in the District of Columbia. I agree. But the Court also concludes that a United States district *489 court has no subject-matter jurisdiction over a claim that those rules have been administered in an unconstitutional manner. According to the Court’s opinion, respondents’ contentions that bar admission rules have been unconstitutionally applied to them by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals somehow constitute impermissible attempts to secure appellate review of final judgments of that court. See ante, at 482, 483-484, n. 16. There are two basic flaws in the Court’s analysis.

First, neither Feldman nor Hickey requested the District of Columbia Court of Appeals to pass on the validity of Rule 461(b)(3) or to grant them admission to the bar or the bar examination as a matter of right. Rather, each of them asked the court to waive the requirements of the rule for a variety of reasons. I would not characterize the court’s refusal to grant a requested waiver as an adjudication. Unlike the decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois reviewed in In re Summers, 325 U. S. 561 (1945), the order of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals did not determine a claim of right, nor did it even apply standard equitable principles to a prayer for relief. Rather, that court performed no more and no less than the administrative function of a licensing board. As the United States Court of Appeals wrote, Hickey asked the court “to make a policy decision equating his personal qualities with accredited legal education, not an adjudication requiring resort to legal principles,” Feldman v. Gardner, 213 U. S. App. D. C. 119, 139, 661 F. 2d 1295, 1315 (1981) (footnote omitted), and Feldman “invoked the administrative discretion of that body, simply asking that it temper its rule in his favor, for personal and not legal reasons,” id., at 140, 661 F. 2d, at 1316 . Rejection of those petitions was not “adjudicative” and was therefore not susceptible to certiorari review in this Court.

Second, even if the refusal to grant a waiver were an adjudication, the federal statute that confers jurisdiction upon *490 the United States District Court to entertain a constitutional challenge to the rules themselves also authorizes that court to entertain a collateral attack upon the unconstitutional application of those rules. The Court’s opinion fails to distinguish between two concepts: appellate review and collateral attack. If a challenge to a state court’s decision is brought in United States district court and alleges violations of the United States Constitution, then by definition it does not seek appellate review. It is plainly within the federal-question jurisdiction of the federal court. 28 U. S. C. § 1331 (1976 ed., Supp. V). There may be other reasons for denying relief to the plaintiff — such as failure to state a cause of action, claim or issue preclusion, or failure to prove a violation of constitutional rights. 2 But it does violence to jurisdictional concepts for this Court to hold, as it does, that the federal district court has no jurisdiction to conduct independent review of a specific claim that a licensing body’s action did not comply with federal constitutional standards. The fact that the licensing function in the legal profession is controlled by the judiciary is not a sufficient reason to immunize allegedly unconstitutional conduct from review in the federal courts.

I therefore respectfully dissent.

Title 28 U. S. C. § 1331 (1976 ed., Supp. V) provides: “The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of all civil actions arising under the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States.”

Constitutional challenges to specific licensing actions may, of course, fail on the merits. But in my view, if plaintiffs challenging a bar admissions decision by a state court prove facts comparable to the allegations made by the plaintiff in error and appellant in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356 (1886), they would clearly be entitled to relief in the United States district court. If they were seeking admission to any other craft regulated by the State, they would unquestionably have such a right.