Byron White, Federalism, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Majority, Thurgood Marshall, Warren Burger, William Brennan, William Rehnquist

Bennett v. Kentucky DOE

Byron White, Federalism, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Majority, Thurgood Marshall, Warren Burger, William Brennan, William Rehnquist / By

JUSTICE O’CONNOR delivered the opinion of the Court.*

This case, like Bennett v. New Jersey, ante p. 470 U. S. 632, concerns an effort by the Federal Government to recover Title I funds that were allegedly misused by a State. There is no contention here that changes in statutory provisions should apply to previous grants. Instead, the dispute is whether the Secretary correctly demanded repayment based on a determination that Kentucky violated requirements that Title I funds be used to supplement, and not to supplant, state and local expenditures for education. Although the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit found that the Secretary’s determination was based on a reasonable interpretation of Title I and its implementing regulations, the court nonetheless excused the State from repayment on the grounds that there was no evidence of bad faith and the State’s programs complied with a reasonable interpretation of the law. Kentucky v. Secretary of Education, 717 F.2d 943, 948 (1983). We granted certiorari, 469 U.S. 814 (1984), and because we disagree with the standard adopted by the Court of Appeals, we reverse.

I

As explained more fully in Bennett v. New Jersey, ante at 470 U. S. 634 -636, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, Pub.L. 89-10, 79 Stat. 27, as amended, 20 U.S.C. § 2701 et seq., provided federal grants to support compensatory education programs for disadvantaged children. In order to assure that federal funds would be used to support additional

Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Criminal Procedure, David Souter, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Majority, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, William Rehnquist

Beecham v. United States

Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Criminal Procedure, David Souter, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Majority, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, William Rehnquist / By

JUSTICE O’CONNOR delivered the opinion of the Court. Today we construe three provisions of the federal firearms statutes:”It shall be unlawful for any person who has been convicted… [of] a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year… [to possess] any firearm…. ” 18 U. S. C. § 922(g).”What constitutes a conviction… shall be determined in accordance with the law of the jurisdiction in which the proceedings were held.” § 921(a)(20) (the choice-oflaw clause).”Any conviction which has been expunged, or set aside or for which a person has been pardoned or has had civil rights restored shall not be considered a conviction…. ” Ibid. (the exemption clause).

The question before us is which jurisdiction’s law is to be considered in determining whether a felon “has had civil rights restored” for a prior federal conviction. I

Each of the petitioners was convicted of violating § 922(g).

Beecham was convicted in Federal District Court in North Carolina, Jones in Federal District Court in West Virginia. Beecham’s relevant prior conviction was a 1979 federal conviction in Tennessee, for violating is U. S. C. § 922(h). App. 11. Jones’ prior convictions were two West Virginia state convictions, for breaking and entering and for forgery, and one 1971 federal conviction in Ohio for interstate transportation of a stolen automobile. Id., at 19-20.

Jones had gotten his civil rights restored by West Virginia, so his two West Virginia state convictions were not considered.

Civil Rights, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Majority, Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan

Bearden v. Georgia

Civil Rights, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Majority, Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan / By

JUSTICE O’CONNOR delivered the opinion of the Court.

The question in this case is whether the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a State from revoking an indigent defendant’s probation for failure to pay a fine and restitution. Its resolution involves a delicate balance between the acceptability, and indeed wisdom, of considering all relevant factors when determining an appropriate sentence for an individual and the impermissibility of imprisoning a defendant solely because of his lack of financial resources. We conclude that the trial court erred in automatically revoking probation because petitioner could not pay his fine, without determining that petitioner had not made sufficient bona fide efforts to pay or that adequate alternative forms of punishment did not exist. We therefore reverse the judgment of the Georgia Court of Appeals upholding the revocation of probation, and remand for a new sentencing determination.

I

In September, 1980, petitioner was indicted for the felonies of burglary and theft by receiving stolen property. He pleaded guilty, and was sentenced on October 8, 1980. Pursuant to the Georgia First Offender’s Act, Ga.Code Ann. § 27-2727 et seq. (current version at § 42-8-60 et seq. (Supp.1982)), the trial court did not enter a judgment of guilt, but deferred further proceedings and sentenced petitioner to three years on probation for the burglary charge and a concurrent one year on probation for the theft charge. As a condition of probation, the trial court

Clarence Thomas, Economic Activity, Partial concurrence, partial dissent

Barclays Bank PLC v. Franchise Tax Bd. of Cal

Clarence Thomas, Economic Activity, Partial concurrence, partial dissent / By

JUSTICE O’CONNOR, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS joins, concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part.

I joined Justice Powell in dissent in Container Corp. of America v. Franchise Tax Bd., 463 U. S. 159 (1983), and I continue to think the Court erred in upholding California’s use of worldwide combined reporting in taxing the income of a domestic-based corporate group. But because the State and private parties have justifiably relied on the constitutionality of taxing such corporations, and Congress has not seen fit to override our decision, I agree with the Court that Container Corp. should not be overruled, cf. Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U. S. 298, 318-319 (1992), and that it resolves the constitutional challenge raised by ColgatePalmolive. I therefore concur in the judgment in No. 921839. Barclays Bank, on the other hand, is a foreign-based parent company of a multinational corporate group, and our holding in Container Corp. expressly does not extend to this situation. See 463 U. S., at 189, n. 26, and 195, n. 32. In my view, the California tax cannot constitutionally be applied to foreign corporations. I therefore respectfully dissent in No. 92-1384.

A state tax on interstate commerce must meet four requirements under our negative Commerce Clause precedents: the tax must be on an activity with a substantial nexus to the taxing State, it must be fairly apportioned, it must not discriminate against interstate commerce, and it must be fairly related to the services

Concurrence, Economic Activity

Bankers Life & Cas. Co. v. Crenshaw

Concurrence, Economic Activity / By

JUSTICE O’CONNOR, with whom JUSTICE SCALIA joins, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.

I do not agree with the Court’s analysis of our jurisdiction over appellant’s federal due process claim. I therefore do not join Part II or footnote 1 of the Court’s opinion. I join the remainder of the opinion, and I agree with the analysis of Part II insofar as claims under the Excessive Fines Clause and Contract Clause are concerned. Moreover, for the reasons given below, I ultimately concur in the Court’s judgment with respect to the due process claim as well.

In its brief on appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court, appellant expressly invoked the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and argued that Mississippi law chilled its fundamental right of access to the courts by authorizing unlimited punitive damages. App. to Juris. Statement 135a. The Court does not acknowledge this argument in its discussion of why the due process claim was not raised and passed upon below, but only notes that appellant did not present a due process argument clearly in its petition for rehearing. Ante at 486 U. S. 77. The Court suggests that it need not consider the due process argument raised in appellant’s brief to the Mississippi Supreme Court because it is “distinct from the attack on the size of the particular award that appellant has waged before this Court.” Ante at 486 U. S. 75, n. 1. Standing alone, this observation is insufficient to deprive this Court of jurisdiction over

Byron White, Economic Activity, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Majority, Thurgood Marshall, Warren Burger, William Brennan, William Rehnquist

Baltimore G. & E. Co. v. NRDC

Byron White, Economic Activity, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Majority, Thurgood Marshall, Warren Burger, William Brennan, William Rehnquist / By

JUSTICE O’CONNOR delivered the opinion of the Court.

Section 102(2)(C) of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, 83 Stat. 853, 42 U.S.C. § 4332(2)(C) (NEPA), requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of any major federal action. [ Footnote 1 ] As part of its generic rulemaking proceedings to evaluate the environmental effects of the nuclear fuel cycle for nuclear powerplants, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Commission) [ Footnote 2 ] decided that licensing boards should assume, for purposes of NEPA, that the permanent storage of certain nuclear wastes would have no significant environmental impact, and thus should not affect the decision whether to license a particular nuclear powerplant. We conclude that the Commission complied with NEPA, and that its decision is not arbitrary or capricious within the meaning of § 10(e) of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U.S.C. § 706. [ Footnote 3 ]

I

The environmental impact of operating a light-water nuclear powerplant [ Footnote 4 ]includes the effects of off-site activities necessary to provide fuel for the plant (“front end” activities), and of off-site activities necessary to dispose of the highly toxic and long-lived nuclear wastes generated by the plant (“back end” activities). The dispute in these cases concerns the Commission’s adoption of a series of generic rules to evaluate the environmental effects of a nuclear powerplant’s fuel cycle. At the heart of each rule is Table S-3, a numerical

Concurrence, Economic Activity

Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter Communities for Great Ore

Concurrence, Economic Activity / By

JUSTICE O’CONNOR, concurring.

My agreement with the Court is founded on two understandings. First, the challenged regulation is limited to significant habitat modification that causes actual, as opposed to hypothetical or speculative, death or injury to identifiable protected animals. Second, even setting aside difficult questions of scienter, the regulation’s application is limited by ordinary principles of proximate causation, which introduce notions of foreseeability. These limitations, in my view, call into question Palila v. Hawaii Dept. of Land and Natural Resources, 852 F.2d 1106 (CA9 1988) (Palila II), and with it, many of the applications derided by the dissent. Because there is no need to strike a regulation on a facial challenge out of concern that it is susceptible of erroneous application, however, and because there are many habitat-related circumstances in which the regulation might validly apply, I join the opinion of the Court.

In my view, the regulation is limited by its terms to actions that actually kill or injure individual animals. JusTICE SCALIA disagrees, arguing that the harm regulation “encompasses injury inflicted, not only upon individual animals, but upon populations of the protected species.” Post, at 716. At one level, I could not reasonably quarrel with this observation; death to an individual animal always reduces the size of the population in which it lives, and in that sense, “injures” that population. But by its insight, the dissent means

Civil Rights, Dissent, John Paul Stevens, William Rehnquist

Atty. Gen. of N.Y. v. Soto-Lopez

Civil Rights, Dissent, John Paul Stevens, William Rehnquist / By

JUSTICE O’CONNOR, with whom JUSTICE REHNQUIST and JUSTICE STEVENS join, dissenting.

The Court today holds unconstitutional the preference in public employment opportunities New York offers to resident wartime veterans who resided in New York when they entered military service. Because I believe that New York’s veterans’ preference scheme is not constitutionally offensive under the Equal Protection Clause, does not penalize some free-floating “right to migrate,” and does not violate the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Art. IV, § 2, of the Constitution, I dissent.

I

The plurality’s constitutional analysis runs generally as follows: because the classification imposed by New York’s limited, one-time veterans’ civil service preference “penalizes” appellees’ constitutional “right to migrate,” the preference program must be subjected to heightened scrutiny, which it does not survive because it is insufficiently narrowly tailored to serve its asserted purposes. On the strength of this reasoning, the plurality concludes that the preference program violates both appellees’ constitutional “right to migrate” and their right to equal protection of the law, see ante at 476 U. S. 911, although it does not make clear how much of its analysis is necessary or sufficient to find a violation of the “right to migrate” independently of an Equal Protection Clause violation.

In pursuing this new dual analysis, the plurality simply rejects the equal protection approach the Court has previously

Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Concurrence, Economic Activity

Atherton v. FDIC

Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Concurrence, Economic Activity / By

JUSTICE O’CONNOR, with whom JUSTICE SCALIA and JUSTICE THOMAS join, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.

I join all of the Court’s opinion, except to the extent that it relies on the notably unhelpful legislative history to 12 U. S. C. § 1821(k). Ante, at 228-230. As the Court cor rectly points out, the most natural reading of the saving clause in § 1821(k) covers both state and federal rights. Ante, at 228. With such plain statutory language in hand, there is no reason to rely on legislative history that is, as the majority recognizes, “not all on one side.” Ante, at 229.

Concurrence, First Amendment

Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union

Concurrence, First Amendment / By

JUSTICE O’CONNOR, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.

I agree with the plurality that even if obscenity on the Internet is defined in terms of local community standards, respondents have not shown that the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) is overbroad solely on the basis of the variation in the standards of different communities. See ante, at 577579. Like JUSTICE BREYER, however, see post, at 589 (opinion concurring in part and concurring in judgment), I write separately to express my views on the constitutionality and desirability of adopting a national standard for obscenity for regulation of the Internet.

The plurality’s opinion argues that, even under local community standards, the variation between the most and least restrictive communities is not so great with respect to the narrow category of speech covered by COPA as to, alone, render the statute substantially overbroad. See ante, at 577-579. I agree, given respondents’ failure to provide examples of materials that lack literary, artistic, political, and scientific value for minors, which would nonetheless result in variation among communities judging the other elements of the test. Respondents’ examples of material for which com munity standards would vary include such things as the appropriateness of sex education and the desirability of adoption by same-sex couples. Brief for Respondents 43. Material addressing the latter topic, however, seems highly unlikely to be seen to appeal to the prurient