On petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Court of
Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.
Justice REHNQUIST, dissenting.
Respondents in this case sought to invoke the jurisdiction of
the United States District Court for the Southern District of
Mississippi under the provisions of 28 U.S.C. 1331 and 1343(3).
They sought compensatory and punitive damages and attorney's fees
or, in the alternative, the rescission of instruments by which they
conveyed certain real property to petitioners. App. to Pet. for
Cert. A2. Petitioners filed the customary Federal Rule of Civil
Procedure 12 motions requesting dismissal of the complaint for lack
of jurisdiction and for failure to state a claim upon which relief
may be granted. The District Judge, a practicing Mississippi lawyer
for many years before he took the bench, granted the motion to
dismiss for lack of jurisdiction:
Page 454 U.S.
1157 , 1158
"The complaint contains conclusory allegations, but when reduced
to the essentials, plaintiffs allege that while they received
$100,830. 00 this was not enough; that the land was in fact worth
several times this amount; that they were induced to sell by the
fraud and deceit of their own attorneys and appraiser; and that the
remaining defendants were in a conspiracy to acquire the land for a
fraction of its true worth.
"The plaintiffs thus are asserting a classic common law action
for the common law tort of fraud and deceit. If the plaintiffs
indeed have such a claim it is properly redressable only in the
state court. The allegations do not reach Federal Constitutional
proportions." Id., at A3.
The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit,
637 F.2d
337, reversed the judgment of dismissal:
"The issue before us is narrow: Was the federal court without
jurisdiction conferred by Congress to decide the case, on the face
of the complaint, under the stringent test enunciated by Bell v.
Hood,
327 U.S.
678, 681-682 [, 775-76], . . . . ( 1946); '[W]here the
complaint . . . is so drawn as to seek recovery directly under the
Constitution or laws of the United States, the federal court, but
for two possible exceptions, . . . must entertain the suit.'
(Italics ours.) (The two exceptions are where the federal question
'clearly appears to be immaterial and made solely for the purpose
of obtaining jurisdiction or where such a claim is wholly
insubstantial and frivolous.' Id.) . . . .
"So tested, the complaint sufficiently states federal claims,
and (without intimating as to the merits of the claims) we reverse
the district court's dismissal for lack of jurisdiction."
637 F.2d
337, 339 (1981).
Had the Court of Appeals been content to end its opinion at that
point, this case would be one among hundreds where busy federal
appellate courts decide whether "conclusory
Page 454 U.S.
1157 , 1159
allegations" made under the "notice pleading" premise of the
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure do or do not properly invoke
federal jurisdiction. This Court in turn would be entirely correct
in concluding that the petition for certiorari does not warrant
plenary consideration. But, for better or for worse, the Court of
Appeals did not stop there. Instead, it proceeded to step on what
is, in my opinion, a legal landmine when it elaborated on the
meaning of Bell v. Hood,
327 U.S. 678 (1946). The
Court of Appeals obviously recognized its obligation to follow the
dictates of that case as best it could, and because to me the
decision in Bell is one of the most cryptic in the recent history
of this Court's jurisprudence, I have nothing but sympathy for
those who seek to divine its meaning.
It is apparent from the above-quoted language of the Court of
Appeals that, on remand, the District Court would be perfectly free
to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim upon which
relief may be granted. This conclusion was made crystal clear by
the concluding language of the Court of Appeals:
"We do not necessarily hold that the
plaintiffs will prevail if they establish the facts alleged in the
petition; we hold only that, taking the facts alleged in the
complaint as true, the plaintiffs have established their right to a
day in federal court. The dismissal for want of subject matter
jurisdiction is reversed, and the case is remanded for further
proceedings in accordance with law." 637 F.2d, at 340.
Whether or not the allegations of the complaint were sufficient
to invoke federal jurisdiction for consideration of the complaint
under 42 U. S.C. 1983 is an issue which the Court of Appeals in
this case approached somewhat differently than did the Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Beistline v. City of San Diego,
256 F.2d
421 (1958), and the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in
Warrington Sewer-
Page 454 U.S.
1157 , 1160
Co. v. Tracy,
463 F.2d
771 (1972). But whether these cases are properly
distinguishable, as the Court of Appeals in this case thought, see
637 F. 2d, at 340, or whether they are not, is an issue on which I
would not vote to grant certiorari if it stood by itself.
The far more fundamental issue, I think, is that the decision of
the Court of Appeals in this case reveals enough differences of
approach among the Federal Courts of Appeals in deciding whether
the federal question alleged in a complaint is "wholly
insubstantial and frivolous" within the meaning of Bell, to suggest
a need for clarification of Bell itself. The Court of Appeals quite
accurately recognized that Bell created, in cases seeking recovery
directly under the Constitution or laws of the United States, three
tiers of review. The first tier was where the complaint stated a
claim found to be wholly insubstantial and frivolous, in which case
it could be dismissed for want of jurisdiction. The second tier was
where the complaint stated a claim not wholly insubstantial and
frivolous, in which case the federal court could not dismiss the
complaint for lack of jurisdiction, but could dismiss it for
failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted. In other
words, at the second-tier level, the federal court might find
simply on the basis of the allegations of the complaint that no
triable constitutional issue was raised, and accordingly dismiss it
on that ground. The third tier of review would be where the federal
court finds the allegations of the complaint sufficient to state a
constitutional claim, and accordingly requires further pleadings,
discovery, and perhaps eventually a trial on the merits to
determine whether the plaintiff can prove the allegations of his
complaint.
But this three-tiered analysis required by Bell seems to me
wholly at odds with Rule 12(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil
Procedure, which quite clearly contemplates only a two-tiered
standard of review of a complaint on a motion to dis-
Page 454 U.S.
1157 , 1161
miss.S * As I understand Rule 12, it requires the federal court
to make a legal determination of whether or not the allegations of
the complaint state a claim upon which relief can be granted. Rule
12(b)(6). This is a question of law, and if the court concludes
that they do not state such a claim, an order of dismissal will be
entered. But if the court concludes that the allegations do state a
claim, the defendant will be required to answer and the case go to
trial unless settled. The trial and, at earlier stages of the case,
summary judgment proceedings, are for the purpose of deciding
disputed issues of material fact.
With the vast expansion in the case dockets of all federal
courts in recent years, the more settled the procedural system by
which these cases are to run the judicial gauntlet, the better off
will be litigants, lawyers, and judges. The Court of Appeals here,
by its careful adherence to the dictates of Bell, has brought out
the sharp contrast between those dictates and the Federal Rules of
Civil Procedure. While the merits of the Court of Appeals'
treatment of the constitutional question in this case may not
justify a grant of certiorari, the question of how Bell can be
reconciled with Rule 12, a question I believe to be fairly subsumed
under
Page 454 U.S.
1157 , 1162
questions 2 and 3 of the petition, does justify such action. "To
conceal [ the] appropriate inquiry invites mechanical or
thoughtless application of misfocused doctrine." Zablocki v.
Redhail,
434 U.S.
374, 396, 686 (1978) (Stewart, J., concurring in judgment).
I would grant the petition for certiorari in this case, limited
to questions 2 and 3 of the petition.
Footnotes
[
Footnote *] It might be argued that
Rule 12(b)(1), which authorizes a court to dismiss a claim for lack
of subject-matter jurisdiction, is the equivalent of the first tier
of Bell. Such an interpretation of Rule 12(b)(1) is possible,
however, only because of the existence of the three-tier analysis
of Bell and its cryptic statement that frivolous complaints invoke
no federal-court jurisdiction. In the absence of Bell, Rule 12(b)(
1) could be properly understood as referring to dismissals for lack
of diversity or amount in controversy, or other more traditional
jurisdictional defects. Thus, the existence of Rule 12(b)(1) does
not obviate the need to clarify Bell.
As 28 U.S.C. 1915(d) demonstrates, dismissals for frivolousness
can be authorized without ambiguity. This Court has not done so in
Rule 12(b)( 1), and Congress has implicitly expressed satisfaction
with the current formulation of Rule 12(b)(1) by not seeking to add
a dismissal-for- frivolousness standard-like that found in
1915(d)-in a manner similar to its revision of the Federal Rules of
Evidence.
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