Brentwood Academy v Tennessee Second. Sch. Athletic Ass'n

• Decision Date: 20 February 2001
• Docket Number: 99901
• Citation: 121 S.Ct. 924,148 L.Ed.2d 807,531 U.S. 288
• Parties: BRENTWOOD ACADEMY, PETITIONER v. TENNESSEE SECONDARY SCHOOL ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION et al.SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

531 U.S. 288

121 S.Ct. 924

148 L.Ed.2d 807

NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the preliminary print of the United States Reports. Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D. C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in order that corrections may be made before the preliminary print goes to press

BRENTWOOD ACADEMY, PETITIONER v TENNESSEE SECONDARY SCHOOL ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION et al.

No. 99-901

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

Argued October 11, 2000

Decided February 20, 2001

Syllabus

Respondent not-for-profit athletic association (Association) regulates interscholastic sport among Tennessee public and private high schools. Most of the State's public high schools are members, representing 84% of the Association's membership. School officials make up the voting membership of the Association's governing council and control board, which typically hold meetings during regular school hours. The Association is largely funded by gate receipts. Association staff, although not state employees, may join the state retirement system. The Association sets membership standards and student eligibility rules and has the power to penalize any member school that violates those rules. The State Board of Education (State Board) has long acknowledged the Association's role in regulating interscholastic competition in public schools, and its members sit as nonvoting members of the Association's governing bodies. When the Association penalized petitioner Brentwood Academy for violating a recruiting rule, Brentwood sued the Association and its executive director under 42 U.S.C. 1983 claiming that the rule's enforcement was state action that violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The District Court granted Brentwood summary judgment, enjoining the rule's enforcement, but the Sixth Circuit found no state action and reversed.

Held: The Association's regulatory activity is state action owing to the pervasive entwinement of state school officials in the Association's structure, there being no offsetting reason to see the Association's acts in any other way. Pp. 5-17.

(a) State action may be found only if there is such a "close nexus between the State and the challenged action" that seemingly private behavior "may be fairly treated as that of the State itself." Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co., 419 U.S. 345, 351. No one fact is a necessary condition for finding state action, nor is any set of circumstances sufficient, for there may be some countervailing reason against attributing activity to the government. The facts that can bear on an attribution's fairness-e.g., a nominally private entity may be a state actor when it is entwined with governmental policies or when government is entwined in its management or control, Evans v. Newton, 382 U.S. 296, 299, 301-unequivocally show that a legal entity's character is determined neither by its expressly private characterization in statutory law, nor by the law's failure to acknowledge its inseparability from recognized government officials or agencies. In National Collegiate Athletic Assn. v. Tarkanian, 488 U.S. 179, this Court anticipated that state action could be found when there is public entwinement in the management or control of an organization whose member public schools are all within a single State. Pp. 6-9.

(b) The necessarily fact-bound inquiry leads to the conclusion of state action here. The Association's nominally private character is overborne by the pervasive entwinement of public institutions and public officials in its composition and workings, and there is no substantial reason to claim unfairness in applying constitutional standards to it. To the extent of 84% of its membership, the Association is an organization of public schools represented by their officials acting in their official capacity to provide an integral element of secondary public schooling, interscholastic athletics. There would be no recognizable Association without the public school officials, who overwhelmingly determine and perform all but the Association's purely ministerial acts. Only the 16% minority of private school memberships keeps the entwinement of the Association and public schools from being total and their identities totally indistinguishable. To complement the entwinement from the bottom up, the State has provided entwinement from the top down: State Board members sit ex officio on the Association's governing bodies and Association employees participate in the state retirement system. Entwinement to the degree shown here requires that the Association be charged with a public character and judged by constitutional standards. Pp. 9-13.

(c) Entwinement is also the answer to the Association's several arguments that the instant facts would not support a state action finding under various other criteria, e.g., the public function test, Rendell&nbhyphBaker v. Kohn, 457 U.S. 830, distinguished. Pp. 13-15.

(d) Although facts showing public action may be outweighed in the name of a value at odds with finding public accountability in the circumstances, e.g., Polk County v. Dodson, 454 U.S. 312, 322, no such countervailing value is present here. The Association's fear that reversing the judgment will trigger an epidemic of federal litigation is unfounded. Save for the Sixth Circuit, every Court of Appeals to consider a statewide athletic association like this one has found it to be a state actor, and there has been no litigation explosion in those jurisdictions. Nor should the Association have dispensation merely because the public schools themselves are state actors subject to suit under 1983 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Pp. 15-16. 180 F.3d 758, reversed and remanded.

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

Souter, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Stevens, O'Connor, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Rehhquist, C. J., and Scalia and Kennedy, JJ., joined.

Opinion of the Court

Justice Souter delivered the opinion of the Court.

The issue is whether a statewide association incorporated to regulate interscholastic athletic competition among public and private secondary schools may be regarded as engaging in state action when it enforces a rule against a member school. The association in question here includes most public schools located within the State, acts through their representatives, draws its officers from them, is largely funded by their dues and income received in their stead, and has historically been seen to regulate in lieu of the State Board of Education's exercise of its own authority. We hold that the association's regulatory activity may and should be treated as state action owing to the pervasive entwinement of state school officials in the structure of the association, there being no offsetting reason to see the association's acts in any other way.

I

Respondent Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (Association) is a not-for-profit membership corporation organized to regulate interscholastic sport among the public and private high schools in Tennessee that belong to it. No school is forced to join, but without any other authority actually regulating interscholastic athletics, it enjoys the memberships of almost all the State's public high schools (some 290 of them or 84% of the Association's voting membership), far outnumbering the 55 private schools that belong. A member school's team may play or scrimmage only against the team of another member, absent a dispensation.

The Association's rulemaking arm is its legislative council, while its board of control tends to administration. The voting membership of each of these nine-person committees is limited under the Association's bylaws to high school principals, assistant principals, and superintendents elected by the member schools, and the public school administrators who so serve typically attend meetings during regular school hours. Although the Association's staff members are not paid by the State, they are eligible to join the State's public retirement system for its employees. Member schools pay dues to the Association, though the bulk of its revenue is gate receipts at member teams' football and basketball tournaments, many of them held in public arenas rented by the Association.

The constitution, bylaws, and rules of the Association set standards of school membership and the eligibility of students to play in interscholastic games. Each school, for example, is regulated in awarding financial aid, most coaches must have a Tennessee state teaching license, and players must meet minimum academic standards and hew to limits on student employment. Under the bylaws, "in all matters pertaining to the athletic relations of his school," App. 138, the principal is responsible to the Association, which has the power "to suspend, to fine, or otherwise penalize any member school for the violation of any of the rules of the Association or for other just cause," id., at 100.

Ever since the Association was incorporated in 1925, Tennessee's State Board of Education (State Board) has (to use its own words) acknowledged the corporation's functions "in providing standards, rules and regulations for interscholastic competition in the public schools of Tennessee," id., at 211. More recently, the State Board cited its statutory authority, Tenn. Code Ann. 49-1-302 (App. 220), when it adopted language expressing the relationship between the Association and the Board. Specifically, in 1972, it went so far as to adopt a rule expressly "designat[ing]" the Association as "the organization to supervise and regulate the athletic activities in which the public junior and senior high schools in Tennessee participate on an interscholastic basis." Tennessee State Board of Education, ...