Boddie v. Connecticut/Dissent Black

by Hugo Black

United States Supreme Court

401 U.S. 371

Boddie  v.  Connecticut

 Argued: Dec. 8, 1969. --- Decided: Nov 17, 1970

Mr. Justice BLACK, dissenting.

This is a strange case and a strange holding. Absent some specific federal constitutional or statutory provision, marriage in this country is completely under state control, and so is divorce. When the first settlers arrived here the power to grant divorces in Great Britain was not vested in that country's courts but in its Parliament. And as recently as 1888 this Court in Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190, 8 S.Ct. 723, 31 L.Ed. 654, upheld a divorce granted by the Legislature of the Territory of Oregon. Since that time the power of state legislatures to grant divorces or vest that power in their courts seems not to have been questioned. It is not be accident that marriage and divorce have always been considered to be under state control. The institution of marriage is of peculiar importance to the people of the States. It is within the States that they live and vote and rear their children under laws passed by their elected representatives. The States provide for the stability of their social order, for the good morals of all their citizens, and for the needs of children from broken homes. The States, therefore, have particular interests in the kinds of laws regulating their citizens when they enter into, maintain, and dissolve marriages. The power of the States over marriage and divorce is complete except as limited by specific constitutional provisions. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 7-12, 87 S.Ct. 1817, 1821-1823, 18 L.Ed.2d 1010 (1967).

The Court here holds, however, that the State of Connecticut has so little control over marriages and divorces of its own citizens that it is without power to charge them practically nominal initial court costs when they are without ready money to put up those costs. The Court holds that the state law requiring payment of costs is barred by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution. Two members of the majority believe that the Equal Protection Clause also applies. I think the Connecticut court costs law is barred by neither of those clauses.

It is true, as the majority points out, that the Court did hold in Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U.S. 12, 76 S.Ct. 585, 100 L.Ed. 891 (1956), that indigent defendants in criminal cases must be afforded the same right to appeal their convictions as is afforded to a defendant who has ample funds to pay his own costs. But in Griffin the Court studiously and carefully refrained from saying one word or one sentence suggesting that the rule there announced to control rights of criminal defendants would control in the quite different field of civil cases And there are strong reasons for distinguishing between the two types of cases.

Criminal defendants are brought into court by the State or Federal Government to defend themselves against charges of crime. They go into court knowing that they may be convicted, and condemned to lose their lives, their liberty, or their property, as a penalty for their crimes. Because of this great governmental power the United States Constitution has provided special protections for people charged with crime. They cannot be convicted under bills of attainder or ex post facto laws. And numerous provisions of the Bill of Rights-the right to counsel, the right to be free from coerced confessions, and other rights-shield defendants in state courts as well as federal courts. See, e.g., Benton v. Maryland, 395 U.S. 784, 89 S.Ct. 2056, 23 L.Ed.2d 707 (1969); Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 88 S.Ct. 1444, 20 L.Ed.2d 491 (1968); Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1 (1964); Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335, 83 S.Ct. 792, 9 L.Ed.2d 799 (1963). With all of these protections safeguarding defendants charged by government with crime, we quite naturally and quite properly held in Griffin that the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses both barred any discrimination in criminal trials against poor defendants who are unable to defend themselves against the State. Had we not so held we would have been unfaithful to the explicit commands of the Bill of Rights, designed to wrap the protections of the Constitution around all defendants upon whom the mighty powers of government are hurled to punish for crime.

Civil lawsuits, however, are not like government prosecutions for crime. Civil courts are set up by government to give people who have quarrels with their neighbors the chance to use a neutral governmental agency to adjust their differences. In such cases the government is not usually involved as a party, and there is no deprivation of life, liberty, or property as punishment for crime. Our Federal Constitution, therefore, does not place such private disputes on the same high level as it places criminal trials and punishment. There is consequently no necessity, no reason, why government should in civil trials be hampered or handicapped by the strict and rigid due process rules the Constitution has provided to protect people charged with crime.

This distinction between civil and criminal proceedings is implicit in Cohen v. Beneficial Indus. Loan Corp., 337 U.S. 541, 69 S.Ct. 1221, 93 L.Ed. 1528 (1949), where we held that a statute requiring some, but not all, plaintiffs in stockholder derivative actions to post a bond did not violate the Due Process or the Equal Protection Clause. The Cohen case is indistinguishable from the one before us. In Cohen, as here, the statute applied to plaintiffs. In both situations the legal relationships involved are creatures of the State, extensively governed by state law. The effect of both statutes may be to deter frivolous or ill-considered suits, and in both instances the State has a considerable interest in the prevention of such suits, which might harm the very relationship the State created and fostered. Finally, the effect of both statutes may be to close the state courts entirely to certain plaintiffs, a result the Court explicitly accepted in Cohen. See id., at 552, 69 S.Ct. at 1228. I believe the present case should be controlled by the Court's thorough opinion in Cohen.

The Court's suggested distinction of Cohen on the ground that the Court there dealt only with the validity of the statute on its face ignores the following pertinent language:

'It is urged that such a requirement will foreclose resort by most stockholders to the only available judicial remedy for the protection of their rights. Of course, to require security for the payment of any kind of costs, or the necessity for bearing any kind of expense of litigation, has a deterring effect. But we deal with power, not wisdom; and we think, notwithstanding this tendency, it is within the power of a state to close its courts to this type of litigation if the condition of reasonable security is not met.' Id., at 552, 69 S.Ct. at 1228. (Emphasis added.)

Rather, Cohen can only be distinguished on the ground that it involved a stockholders' suit, while this case involves marriage, an interest 'of basic importance in our society.' Thus the Court's opinion appears to rest solely on a philosophy that any law violates due process if it is unreasonable, arbitrary, indecent, deviates from the fundamental, is shocking to the conscience, or fails to meet other tests composed of similar words or phrases equally lacking in any possible constitutional precision. These concepts, of course, mark no constitutional boundaries and cannot possibly depend upon anything but the belief of particular judges, at particular times, concerning particular interests which those judges have divined to be of 'basic importance.'

I do not believe the wise men who sought to draw a written constitution to protect the people from governmental harassment and oppression, who feared alike the king and the king's judges, would have used any such words or phrases. Such unbounded authority in any group of politically apointed or elected judges would unquestionably be sufficient to classify our Nation as a government of men, not the government of laws of which we boast. With a 'shock the conscience' test of Constitutionality, citizens must guess what is the law, guess what a majority of nine judges will believe fair and reasonable. Such a test wilfully throws away the certainty and security that lies in a written constitution, one that does not alter with a judge's health, belief, or his politics. I believe the only way to steer this country towards its great destiny is to follow what our Constitution says, not what judges think it should have said.

For these reasons I am constrained to repeat what I said in dissent in Williams v. North Carolina, 325 U.S. 226, 271-274, 65 S.Ct. 1092, 1114-1114, 89 L.Ed. 1577 (1945):

'I cannot agree to this latest expansion of federal power and the consequent diminution of state power over marriage and marriage dissolution which the Court derives from adding a new content to the Due Process Clause. The elasticity of that clause necessary to justify this holding is found, I suppose, in the notion that it was intended to give this Court unlimited authority to supervise all assertions of state and federal power to see that they comport with our ideas of what are 'civilized standards of law.' * * *

'* * * This perhaps is in keeping with the idea that the due process clause is a blank sheet of paper provided for courts to make changes in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in accordance with their ideas of civilization's demands. I should leave the power over divorces in the states.'

See also In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 377, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 1079, 25 L.Ed.2d 368 (1970) (Black, J., dissenting).

On more thought about the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses: neither, in my judgment, justifies judges in trying to make our Constitution fit the times, or hold laws constitutional or not on the basis of a judge's sense of fairness. The Equal Protection Clause is no more appropriate a vehicle for the 'shock the conscience' test than is the Due Process Clause. See, e.g., my dissent in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663, 675-680, 86 S.Ct. 1079, 1086-1088, 16 L.Ed.2d 169 (1966). The rules set out in the Constitution itself provide what is governmentally fair and what is not. Neither due process nor equal protection permits state laws to be invalidated on any such nonconstitutional standard as a judge's personal view of fairness. The people and their elected representatives, not judges, are constitutionally vested with the power to amend the Constitution. Judges should not usurp that power in order to put over their own views. Accordingly, I would affirm this case.

Notes