OCTOBER TERM, 1991
Syllabus
WILLIAM "SKY" KING
v. ST. VINCENT'S HOSPITAL
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE
ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
No. 90-889. Argued October 16, 1991-Decided December 16,1991
Petitioner King, a National Guard member, advised his civilian
employer, respondent St. Vincent's Hospital, that he had accepted a
3-year fulltime appointment with the Guard, and requested a leave
of absence from his hospital job as ostensibly guaranteed by 38 U.
S. C. § 2024(d), which provides reemployment rights to service
personnel in King's position. St. Vincent's denied King's request
and brought suit in the District Court, seeking a declaratory
judgment that the Act does not provide reemployment rights after
tours of duty as long as King's. The court granted the requested
relief, ruling that service of the type in question was protected
by § 2024(d), but holding, under Circuit precedent, that leave
requests under that subsection must be reasonable, and that King's
request for a 3-year leave was
per se unreasonable. A panel
of the Court of Appeals affirmed.
Held: Section 2024(d) does not limit the length of
military service after which a member of the Armed Forces retains a
right to civilian reemployment. Subsection (d)'s text-which
specifies that any covered employee "shall ... be granted a leave
... for the period required to perform active duty [and] [u]pon ...
release from ... such duty ... shall be permitted to return to [his
or her] position" -is utterly silent about any durationallimit on
the protection it provides. Reading the statute as a whole, it must
be inferred that the unqualified nature of subsection (d)'s
protection was deliberate, since other subsections of § 2024,
protecting other classes of full-time service personnel, expressly
limit the periods of their protection. St. Vincent's argument that
such limits reflect a hierarchy of reemployment rights-under which
reservists subject to duty under subsection (d) are entitled to the
least protection and are therefore subject to an imprecise
durationallimit of reasonableness-is unconvincing because its
conclusion rests on circular reasoning, requiring the assumption of
the point at issue: that § 2024(d) reservists really do get less
protection than the inductees, enlistees, and other veterans
covered by the other subsections. Pp. 218-223.
901 F.2d
1068, reversed and remanded.
216
SOUTER, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which all
other Members joined, except THOMAS, J., who took no part in the
consideration or decision of the case.
Amy L. Wax argued the cause for petitioner. With her on the
briefs were Solicitor General Starr, Assistant Attorney General
Gerson, Deputy Solicitor General Shapiro, and Michael Jay
Singer.
Harry L. Hopkins argued the cause and filed a brief for
respondent.
JUSTICE SOUTER delivered the opinion of the Court.
The issue in this case is whether 38 U. S. C. § 2024(d), a
provision of what is popularly known as the Veterans' Reemployment
Rights Act, implicitly limits the length of military service after
which a member of the Armed Forces retains a right to civilian
reemployment. We hold that it does not.
I
In June 1987, petitioner William "Sky" King,l a member of the
Alabama National Guard,2 applied to become command sergeant major
in the Active Guard/Reserve (AGR) program, and thereby undertook to
serve the 3-year tour of duty required by Army regulations 3 of the
person holding that position.4 The next month King learned of his
selection and advised his employer, respondent St. Vincent's
Hospital, that he had accepted the Guard's 3-year full-time
appointment.
1 How and why petitioner's nickname claimed a place in the
caption of this case is a mystery of the record.
2 The Alabama National Guard is a militia under state control
except under certain constitutionally defined circumstances. See U.
S. Const., Art. I, § 8, cl. 15. Because Congress nonetheless is
authorized generally to "provide for organizing, arming, and
disciplining" the Guard, cl. 16, federal law is at issue in this
case.
3 Department of Army Reg. 135-18, ch. 2, § II, 2-9. Length of
periods of AD or FTD (1985).
4 The AGR program was established by Congress in 1980. See
Department of Defense Authorization Act, 1980, § 401(b), 93 Stat.
807.
217
He requested a leave of absence from his hospital job as
ostensibly guaranteed by the Act and reported for military duty, as
ordered, on August 17. Several weeks later, St. Vincent's advised
him that his request was unreasonable and thus beyond the Act's
guarantee.
After so informing King, St. Vincent's took the further step of
bringing a declaratory judgment action in the United States
District Court for the Northern District of Alabama to settle the
issue whether the applicable terms of the Act provided reemployment
rights after tours of duty as long as King's. Although the court
held that service in the AGR program carried protection under §
2024(d),5 it nonetheless rendered declaratory judgment for St.
Vincent's on the ground that the request for a 3-year leave of
absence was
per se unreasonable. In imposing a test of
reasonableness on King's request, the District Court was following
the opinion of the Eleventh Circuit in
Gulf States Paper
Corp. v.
Ingram, 811 F.2d
1464, 1468 (1987), which had in turn interpreted a Fifth
Circuit case as requiring that leave requests for protection under
§ 2024(d) must be reasonable. See
Lee v.
Pensacola,
634 F.2d
886, 889 (1981).6 A panel of the Eleventh Circuit affirmed,
with two judges agreeing with the District Court that guaranteeing
reemployment after a 3-year tour of duty would be
per se
unreasonable, thereby putting King outside the protection of §
2024(d).
901 F.2d
1068 (1990). Judge Roney concurred separately that King's
request was unreasonable, but dissented from the creation of a
per se rule.
Id., at 1072-1073.
5 Section 2024(d) covers AGR participants. See Veterans'
Rehabilitation and Education Amendments of 1980, § 5ll(b), 94 Stat.
2207. Neither party contests the applicability of § 2024(d) to
King's leave request.
6
Lee is binding precedent in the Eleventh Circuit, as it
was decided on January 20, 1981, before the Eleventh Circuit was
carved out of the Fifth. See
Bonner v.
Prichard,
661 F.2d
1206, 1207 (CAll 1981) (en banc) (Fifth Circuit decisions
handed down as of Sept. 30, 1981, adopted as Eleventh Circuit
precedent).
218
Like the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, the Third has engrafted a
reasonableness requirement onto § 2024(d). Eidu
konis v.
Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority,
873 F.2d
688, 694 (1989).7 The Fourth Circuit, on the other hand, has
declined to do so.
Kolkhorst v.
Tilghman,
897 F.2d
1282, 1286 (1990), cert. pending, No. 89-1949. We granted
certiorari to resolve this conflict, 498 U. S. 1081 (1991), and now
reverse the judgment of the Eleventh Circuit.
II
We start with the text of § 2024(d), see
Schreiber v.
Burlington Northern, Inc., 472 U. S. 1, 5 (1985),
which is free of any express conditions upon the provisions in
contention here:
"[Any covered person] shall upon request be granted a leave of
absence by such person's employer for the period required to
perform active duty for training or inactive duty training in the
Armed Forces of the United States. Upon such employee's release
from a period of such ... [duty] ... such employee shall be
permitted to return to such employee's position with such
seniority, status, pay, and vacation as such employee would have
had if such employee had not been absent for such purposes." 38 U.
S. C. § 2024(d).
Thus, the Fourth Circuit could call the subsection's guarantee
of leave and reemployment "unequivocal and unqualified,"
Kolkhorst, supra, at 1286, and the Eleventh Circuit itself
observed that the subsection "does not address the
7See also
Lemmon v.
County of Santa Cruz, 686 F.
Supp. 797, 802 (ND Cal. 1988) (adopting reasonableness requirement
set forth in
Lee v.
Pensacola, 634
F.2d 886 (CA5 1981));
Bottger v.
Doss
Aeronautical Servs., Inc., 609 F. Supp. 583, 585 (MD Ala. 1985)
(following
Lee); Anthony v.
Basic Am. Foods, Inc.,
600 F. Supp. 352, 354-355 (ND Cal. 1984) (both parties accepting
reasonableness test).
219
'reasonableness' of a reservist's leave request."
Gulf
States, supra, at 1468.
Although St. Vincent's recognizes the importance of the
statute's freedom from provisos, see Brief for Respondent 9, it
still argues that the text of subsection (d) favors its position.
The hospital stresses that "leave" as used in subsection (d) is to
be enjoyed by an "employee," whose status as such implies that the
employment relationship continues during the absence. Accordingly,
employees protected under subsection (d) are "returned" to their
positions after military service is over, while reservists
protected by other subsections of § 2024 are "restored" to theirs,s
the difference in language attesting that the former remain
employees, while the latter cease to be such during their time
away. The hospital argues that the very notion of such a continuing
relationship is incompatible with absences as lengthy as King's,
and finds that conclusion supported by the provisions speaking to
the actual mechanics for resuming employment. While the reservists
subject to other subsections must reapply for employment, those
protected by subsection (d) are allowed, and indeed required, to
"report for work at the beginning of the next regularly scheduled
working period" after the tour of military duty expires. The
hospital posits the impracticality of expecting an employee to
report for work immediately after a 3-year absence, "to take his
apron off the peg," as the hospital's counsel put it, and go back
to work as if nothing had happened. It also makes much of the
difficulties of filling responsible positions that would follow if
their incumbents could be turned out so abruptly after serving for
so long, upon the prior incumbent's equally abrupt return.
8 Subsections (a), (b), (c), and (g) identify other classes of
reservists, enlistees, and those called to active duty, and make
applicable to those classes the reemployment protection offered
inductees pursuant to 38 U. S. C. § 2021(a)(2)(A)(i), namely,
"restor[ation]" to the formerly held position "or to a position of
like seniority, status, and pay."
220
To these arguments, and others like them that we do not set out
at length, two replies are in order. We may grant that the
congressionally mandated leave of absence can be an ungainly
perquisite of military service, when the tour of duty lasts as long
as King's promises to do, and if we were free to tinker with the
statutory scheme we could reasonably accord some significance to
the burdens imposed on both employers and workers when long leaves
of absence are the chosen means of guaranteeing eventual
reemployment to military personnel.
But to grant all this is not to find equivocation in the
statute's silence, so as to render it susceptible to interpretive
choice. On the contrary, the verbal distinctions underlying the
hospital's arguments become pallid in the light of a textual
difference far more glaring than any of them: while, as noted,
subsection (d) is utterly silent about any durational limit on the
protection it provides, other subsections of § 2024, protecting
other classes of full-time service personnel, expressly limit the
periods of their protection. Thus, § 2024(a) currently gives
enlistees at least four years of reemployment protection, with the
possibility of an extension to five years and even longer. Again,
for example, § 2024(b)(1) extends protection to those entering
active duty (except for "the purpose of determining physical
fitness [or] for training") for at least four years, with the
possibility of a further extension beyond that.9 Given the examples
of affirmative
9 As a counterexample, St. Vincent's might cite § 2024(g),
providing reservists ordered to active duty for not more than 90
days with a guarantee of reemployment extending through their
period of duty. Standing alone with subsection (d), this provision
might suggest that a guarantee extending through the duration of a
reservist's tour of active duty must be express; but the examples
of specific durationallimitations described in the text above show
that Congress knew how to provide limits on its benefits when that
was the intent. Even if the express examples unsettled the
significance of subsection (d)'s drafting, however, we would
ultimately read the provision in King's favor under the canon that
provisions for benefits to members of the Armed Services are to be
construed in the beneficiaries'
221
limitations on reemployment benefits conferred by neighboring
provisions, we infer that the simplicity of subsection (d) was
deliberate, consistent with a plain meaning to provide its benefit
without conditions on length of service.
In so concluding we do nothing more, of course, than follow the
cardinal rule that a statute is to be read as a whole, see
Massachusetts v.
Morash, 490 U. S. 107, 115
(1989), since the meaning of statutory language, plain or not,
depends on context. See,
e. g., Shell Oil Co. v.
Iowa
Dept. of Revenue, 488 U. S. 19, 26 (1988). "Words are not
pebbles in alien juxtaposition; they have only a communal
existence; and not only does the meaning of each interpenetrate the
other, but all in their aggregate take their purport from the
setting in which they are used .... "
NLRB v.
Federbush
Co., 121 F.2d 954, 957 (CA2 1941) (L. Hand, J.) (quoted in
Shell Oil, supra, at 25, n. 6).10
St. Vincent's itself embraces the same principle (though, we
think, by way of misapplication) by countering the preceding
textual analysis with a structural analysis of its own, in which it
purports to discern a significant hierarchy of reemployment rights
in the statutory scheme. As the hospital reads § 2024 together with
its companion provisions, the most generous protection goes to
inductees, whose reemployment rights are unqualified by any
reference to duration of service.ll Enlistees and those entering
active duty in response to an order or call come next with
protection so long
favor.
Fishgold v.
Sullivan Drydock &
Repair Corp., 328 U. S. 275, 285
(1946). We will presume congressional understanding of such
interpretive principles,
e. g., McNary v.
Haitian Refugee
Center, Inc., 498
U. S. 479,496 (1991) ("It is presumable that Congress
legislates with knowledge of our basic rules of statutory
construction").
10 See also
United States v.
Hartwell, 6 Wall.
385, 396 (1868) (in construing statute court should adopt that
sense of words which best harmonizes with context and promotes
policy and objectives of legislature); see generally 2A C. Sands,
Sutherland on Statutory Construction § 46.05 (rev. 4th
ed.1984).
11 See 38 U. S. C. § 2021.
222
as their tours of duty do not exceed five years; 12 and at what
the hospital claims to be "the bottom of the employment rights
scheme," Brief for Respondent 16, fall the reemployment rights
protected by § 2024(d).
Ibid. It is not unnatural, on this
view, that the least protected veterans should be subject to an
imprecise limit of reasonableness on the length of voluntary duty
giving rise to their job protectionP
But the hospital's argument does not convince. While it invokes
the significance of context, its conclusion rests on quite circular
reasoning. There are, as we have just pointed out, differences of
treatment among the various classes of service people protected by
various provisions of the statute. But differences do not
necessarily make hierarchies, and the differences revealed by the
hospital's examples do not point inexorably downward without
assuming the point at issue, that the reservists subject to
training duty within the meaning of subsection (d) really do get
less protection than inductees, enlistees, and so on, covered by
other provisions. Without such an assumption there are simply
differences of treatment, to be respected by limiting protection
where the text contains a limit and leaving textually unlimited
protection just where the Congress apparently chose to leave it.
Because the text of § 2024(d) places no limit on the length of a
tour after which King may enforce his reemployment rights against
St. Vincent's, we hold it plain that no limit was implied. 14
12 See 38 U. S. C. §§ 2024(a), 2024(b)(1). The basic limit here
is four years, with an additional year of protection if the
Government requests additional service.
13 The hospital claims to find additional support for this
declension in the legislative history of § 2024(d), relying heavily
on excerpts from the House and Senate Reports on the 1960 bill that
eventuated in the current statute. Brief for Respondent 17-18, and
n. 31.
14 "When we find the terms of a statute unambiguous, judicial
inquiry is complete, except in rare and exceptional circumstances."
Rubin v.
United States, 449 U. S. 424, 430 (1981)
(internal quotation marks omit-
223
III
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case
is remanded for proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
JUSTICE THOMAS took no part in the consideration or decision of
this case.
ted). Such circumstances are not present here; as we indicate
below, the hospital's invocation of legislative history does not
make its case.
The hospital relies heavily on 1960 Senate and House Reports
citing short-term leaves as covered by §2024. See S. Rep. No. 1672,
86th Cong., 2d Sess., 2; H. R. Rep. No. 1263, 86th Cong., 2d Sess.,
6; see also Brief for Respondent 17, n. 31. While this history may
demonstrate that in 1960 § 2024(d) applied to short leaves, the
significance of this is surely blunted by Congress' undoubted
intention 20 years later to apply the subsection to long leaves
when it brought AGR participants under §2024(d). See Veterans'
Rehabilitation and Education Amendments of 1980, § 511 (b), 94
Stat. 2207.
The inference that Congress intended no such limits as the
hospital espouses is buttressed by a joint House-Senate Conference
Committee's disapproval of a shift in the position taken by the
Department of Labor on this issue. Before 1981 the Department took
the position we adopt. See United States Department of Labor,
Veterans' Reemployment Rights Handbook 111 (1970). After Lee v.
Pensacola,
634 F.2d
886 (CA5 1981), the Department adopted the different view that
§ 2024(d) protection applied only to leaves of 90 days or less. See
H. R. Rep. No. 97-782, p. 8 (1982). Subsequently, a joint
House-Senate Conference Committee Report announced that the House
and Senate Veterans' Mfairs Committees "d[id] not believe that the
90-day limit [was] well-founded either as legislative
interpretation or application of the pertinent case law." 128 Congo
Rec. 25513 (1982). Coming as it did in the aftermath of Congress'
decision to place AGR participants under the coverage of §2024(d),
this statement is decidedly at odds with the hospital's position,
and confirms the conclusion that enactment of the AGR program was
not intended to modify the ostensibly unconditional application of
§ 2024(d).
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