Procedure - Constitutional Analysis

In Goldberg, the Court held that due process requires an evidentiary hearing prior to termination of welfare benefits, because individuals receiving welfare have a property interest in continued receipt of benefits. In so holding, the Court rejected the rights-privileges distinction that had previously dominated the inquiry whether a deprivation required due process. See McAuliffe v. New Bedford (Mass.) (Oliver Wendell Holmes) (holding that the government did not have to provide due process before firing a police officer for his political activities because although “the petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics … he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.”). The Court held that although the hearing did not to take the form of a judicial or quasi-judicial trial, the recipient must have timely and adequate notice and an effective opportunity to defend by confronting any adverse witnesses and by presenting his own arguments and evidence orally, and that the recipient must be allowed to retain counsel.

The case is interesting because it represents a shift in the baseline used to define property; rather than relying on the common law as the appropriate baseline, the Court treated the economic ordering of the welfare state as the appropriate baseline. The Court explicitly endorsed the view of Professor Charles Reich, who wrote in a classic article that “Society today is built around entitlements … Many of the most important entitlements now flow from government … Such sources of security … are no longer regarded as luxuries or gratuities; to the recipients they are essentials, fully deserved, and in no sense a form of charity.”

In DeShaney, the Court stated that the due process clauses “generally confer no affirmative right to governmental aid, even where such aid may be necessary to secure life, liberty, or property interests of which the government itself may not deprive the individual.” The exceptions are cases when a person is in government custody or where the government itself created the danger; no special relationship exists simply because the State knows that an individual faces a special danger of abuse and specifically proclaims, by word and deed, its intention to protect the individual from danger. Rehnquist, J., noted a further exception: “The State may not … selectively deny its protective services to certain disfavored minorities without violating the Equal Protection Clause,” but found that DeShaney had not argued that such selective enforcement was occurring.

Brennan, J., dissented: “Oppression can result when a State undertakes a vital duty and the ignores it.” “If the State cuts off private sources of aid and then refuses aid itself, it cannot wash its hand of the harm that results from its inaction.” That was what occurred here: “A private citizen, or even a person working in a government agency other than DSS, would doubtless feel that her job was done as soon as she … reported her suspicions of child abuse to DSS.” Blackmun, J., also dissented: “Like the antebellum judges who denied relief to fugitive slaves, the Court today claims that its decision, however harsh, is compelled by existing legal doctrine. On the contrary, the question presented in this case is an open one. … I would adopt a “sympathetic” reading, one which comports with dictates of fundamental justice and recognizes that compassion need not be exiled from the province of judging.”

In Castle Rock, the Court held that a woman had no protected property interest in a restraining order, within the meaning of the due process clause. Scalia, J., writing for the Court, stated that a “benefit is not a protected entitlement if government officials may grant or deny it in their discretion.” The Court explained that police always have discretion as to how to enforce a law – even when dealing with a statute that purports to be a mandatory arrest statute. Further, the Court asserted that, even if the restraining order were mandatory, it might not constitute a property interest because it did not have “some ascertainable monetary value,” – failing to consider the possibility that the monetary value of a restraining order could be fixed to the cost of hiring private security. Finally, the Court emphasized that “the alleged property interest … arises incidentally … out of a function that government actors have always performed…” Stevens, J., dissented, finding that the statute in question created “a right to police assistance comparable to the right [an individual] would have possessed to any other service the government or a private firm might undertake to provide.” “At the very least, due process requires the relevant state decisionmaker listen to the claimant and then apply the relevant criteria in reaching this decision.”

In Paul v. Davis, the Court held that harm to reputation, by itself, is not a deprivation of liberty or property within the meaning of the due process clause. The case involved an individual arrested for shoplifting charges; thereafter, the police circulated a flyer designating him as an “active shoplifter.” After the shoplifting charges were dismissed, Paul filed an action under § 1983, alleging that the police officials had deprived him of due process. The Court rejected the claim: “Our cases do not establish the proposition that reputation alone, apart from some more tangible interests such as employment, is either “liberty” or “property” by itself sufficient to invoke the procedural protection of the Due Process Clause.”

Brennan, J., filed a passionate dissent: “The Court today holds that public officials … may on their own initiative and without trial … condemn innocent individuals as criminals and thereby brand them with one of the most stigmatizing and debilitating labels in our society. The Court … render[s] due process concerns never applicable to the official stigmatization, however arbitrary, of an individual. The logical and disturbing corollary of this holding is that no due process infirmities would inhere in a statute constituting a commission to conduct ex parte trials of individuals, so long as the only official judgment pronounced was limited to the public condemnation and branding of the person as a Communist, a traitor … or any other mark that “merely” carries social opprobrium.”

In Caperton, the Court held that due process require the recusal of a state judge where “the probability of actual bias on the part of the judge or decisionmaker is too high to be constitutionally tolerable.” In contrast to the majority opinion, which emphasized that the test concerned the probability of actual bias, Scalia, J., in dissent, was concerned with the appearance of the judicial system: “What above all else is eroding public confidence in the Nation’s judicial system is the perception that litigation is just a game, that the party with the most resourceful lawyer can play it to win, that our seemingly interminable legal proceedings are wonderfully self-perpetuating but incapable of delivering real-world justice. The Court’s opinion will reinforce that perception, adding to the...