Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1978

Foley v. Connelie

435 U.S. 291 | 98 S. Ct. 1067 | 55 L. Ed. 2d 287 | 1978 U.S. LEXIS 71

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Takeaway

In short, Foley v. Connelie holds that a State may require police officers to be U.S. citizens because policing is a core governmental function involving broad discretionary execution of public policy, triggering only rational-basis review under the political-function exception to ordinary strict scrutiny of alienage classifications.

Background

Edmund Foley was a lawful permanent resident alien who sought to become a New York State trooper. New York filled trooper positions through competitive examinations, but a state statute barred anyone who was not a United States citizen from appointment to the State Police. Officials therefore refused to let Foley take the examination.

Foley brought a class action seeking a declaration that the citizenship requirement violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A three-judge federal district court upheld the statute, reasoning that the police function was a fundamental governmental responsibility. The Supreme Court noted probable jurisdiction and affirmed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether alienage classifications excluding lawful permanent residents from public employment ordinarily receive strict equal-protection scrutiny, or whether a different standard applies to positions tied to self-government.

Holding

A State need not satisfy strict scrutiny when it limits to citizens important nonelective positions involving direct participation in the formulation, execution, or review of broad public policy; for those positions, the citizenship requirement need only bear a rational relationship to the State's interest.

Reasoning

The Court recognized that aliens are persons protected by the Fourteenth Amendment and that state discrimination against resident aliens ordinarily receives close judicial scrutiny. Prior cases had invalidated alienage-based exclusions from welfare, higher-education aid, licensed professions, and broad categories of civil-service work because those restrictions impaired aliens' ability to live and earn a livelihood in the community.

But the Court held that the usual strict-scrutiny rule does not erase the constitutional distinction between citizens and aliens. Citizenship marks membership in the political community and carries the right to participate in democratic decisionmaking. A State therefore has historical authority to reserve voting, elective office, jury service, and certain significant governmental offices to citizens.

Under Sugarman v. Dougall, the relevant exception covers important nonelective executive, legislative, and judicial positions whose holders participate directly in the formulation, execution, or review of broad public policy. The inquiry is position-specific: a court must determine whether the job entails discretionary decisionmaking or policy execution that substantially affects members of the political community. A State may not use an indiscriminate citizenship rule that sweeps in jobs lacking those features.

When a position falls within this political-function exception, the State need show only a rational relationship between citizenship and the interest it seeks to protect. The exception is not based on reserving desirable jobs for citizens; it rests on the people's interest in being governed in consequential public matters by members of their own political community.

Issue #2

Whether a New York State trooper occupies a position for which New York may constitutionally require United States citizenship.

Holding

Yes. State troopers directly execute broad public policy through extensive discretionary police powers, and New York's citizenship requirement is rationally related to the special demands of that governmental role.

Reasoning

New York State troopers possess the traditional and substantial powers of peace officers throughout the State. They prevent and detect crime, investigate suspicious conduct, apprehend suspects, execute warrants, and exercise search, seizure, arrest, and lawful-force authority. They remain on call at all times and must respond when they observe criminal activity.

Although rank-and-file police officers do not formulate policy in the ordinary sense, they exercise a vast range of discretion while carrying out the State's law-enforcement policy. Their decisions can immediately and profoundly affect persons' liberty, privacy, homes, possessions, and physical safety, including through vehicle stops, searches, entries into buildings, arrests, and use of force.

The Court distinguished police work from common occupations and routine public employment. The broad discretionary authority entrusted to police officers, and the serious consequences that may follow from its exercise or abuse, place police officers among the important nonelective officials who participate directly in executing broad public policy.

New York could rationally conclude that officers wielding these coercive powers should be citizens, whom the State may presume have accepted allegiance to the Constitution and share familiarity with and sympathy for American political traditions. Because the police function is a core governmental responsibility, the Equal Protection Clause permits New York to reserve state-trooper positions for United States citizens.

Concurrences

Justice Stewart

Reasoning

Justice Stewart joined the Court's judgment and opinion but candidly acknowledged tension between the result and the broad reasoning of several earlier alienage decisions. He concurred because he had become increasingly doubtful of the validity of those prior decisions, some of which he had previously joined, rather than because he believed the earlier cases could readily be reconciled with the Court's holding.

Justice Blackmun

Reasoning

Justice Blackmun agreed that New York could exclude aliens from service as state troopers, notwithstanding his participation in earlier decisions invalidating citizenship requirements for welfare, public employment, professional licensing, and educational assistance. In his view, the Court's precedents supplied the applicable distinction rather than requiring a departure from them.

He emphasized that the ordinary rule subjects alienage classifications to close scrutiny, but Sugarman and Nyquist recognize an exception when a State acts to preserve its political community by defining qualifications for voters, elected officials, or important nonelective officials who directly formulate, execute, or review broad public policy.

Because New York vested its troopers with duties and powers basic to state government, Justice Blackmun concluded that the State could rationally decide that those who execute those duties should be persons presumed to share the political community's values. On that basis, rational-basis review sustained the citizenship requirement.

Dissents

Justice Marshall

Reasoning

Justice Marshall, joined by Justices Brennan and Stevens, maintained that alienage classifications are ordinarily suspect and that the Court had repeatedly invalidated state laws discriminating against lawful resident aliens. He viewed the Sugarman political-function exception as narrow and concluded that a state-trooper position did not fit within it.

In his view, reading “execution of broad public policy” to include ordinary law enforcement would make the exception swallow the rule, because virtually every public employee executes some governmental policy. The phrase instead refers to positions with delegated responsibility for setting or directing broad policy, such as an agency head who promulgates regulations, not employees who apply preexisting policy to individual factual situations.

Police officers exercise significant judgment, but Justice Marshall characterized that judgment as factual and operational rather than policymaking. Constitutions, statutes, regulations, and superior officials establish the policy choices; an officer generally determines how those choices apply to the circumstances confronting him. The Court's own qualified-immunity cases, he argued, distinguished the narrower discretion of police officers from the broad policy discretion of high executive officials.

Justice Marshall also rejected the majority's reliance on troopers' arrest and search authority. New York allowed any person, including an alien, to make certain arrests and to search incident to those arrests. It was therefore inconsistent, he argued, to treat police arrest authority as making alien officers constitutionally intolerable while allowing aliens to possess comparable authority as private persons.

Finally, he found no independent justification for the exclusion. The suggestion that alien officers might be unreliable in enforcing laws against other aliens rested on an offensive group-based assumption. Since a trooper did not formulate broad governmental policy and New York showed neither a compelling interest nor a suitably narrow fit, Justice Marshall would have held the statute unconstitutional.

Justice Stevens

Reasoning

Justice Stevens, joined by Justice Brennan, agreed that the State may carefully assess the competence and trustworthiness of individual police applicants. But he objected to a blanket exclusion of all aliens, which both deprives the State of qualified talent and denies individuals employment based on an assumed group characteristic rather than their own qualifications.

The only plausible group characteristic, he reasoned, was supposed foreign allegiance or a resulting concern about loyalty. But that rationale could not be reconciled with In re Griffiths, which held that a State may not categorically exclude aliens from practicing law. If aliens can take an oath to support the Constitution and can be individually screened for trustworthiness as lawyers, the Court had not explained why all aliens must be presumed untrustworthy as police officers.

Justice Stevens rejected the majority's treatment of all police officers as policymakers. The relevant distinction under Sugarman and analogous patronage cases is between policymakers and ordinary employees. In a representative democracy, the police and military generally implement policies set by elected officials and citizens; they do not themselves formulate broad policy merely because their work is essential to government.

Citizenship properly confers the exclusive privilege of participating in democratic policymaking, including voting and holding offices that make broad policy. But persons subject to a government's jurisdiction are otherwise entitled to equal treatment, and a State needs a good, relevant reason to deny them employment opportunities. Because police officers are not policymakers and the Court did not identify a valid class-based justification for their exclusion, Justice Stevens would invalidate the statute.