D'Amico v. Schweiker, 82-2495
| Decision Date | 03 February 1983 |
| Docket Number | No. 82-2495,82-2495 |
| Citation | 698 F.2d 903 |
| Parties | James M.P. D'AMICO, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Richard S. SCHWEIKER, et al., Defendants-Appellees. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
Thomas H. Ploss, Chicago, Ill., for plaintiffs-appellants.
Brian G. Kennedy, Civil Div., Dept. of Justice, Washington, D.C., for defendants-appellees.
Before POSNER and COFFEY, Circuit Judges, and NEAHER, Senior District Judge. *
The plaintiffs in this case, seven administrative law judges of the Social Security Administration, seek an injunction against an instruction that the Social Security Administration has issued to all of its administrative law judges. The district judge held that the plaintiffs had standing to bring such a suit but that the instruction was lawful, and so he dismissed the complaint on the merits. The administrative law judges appeal. The first and only question we consider is their standing to sue.
If you are receiving social security disability benefits, and cease to be disabled, you must repay any benefits you received after you ceased to be disabled--after "cessation," in bureaucratese. The Social Security Act does not tell the Social Security Administration how to determine when disability has ceased but it does authorize the Administration to prescribe by regulation "the criteria for determining when services performed or earnings derived from services demonstrate an individual's ability to engage in substantial gainful activity," 42 U.S.C. Sec. 423(d)(4), and such a regulation has been promulgated, 20 C.F.R. Sec. 404.1594.
The challenged instruction was issued by SSA's chief administrative law judge and concerns "retroactive cessation" (cessation prior to the sending of notice that benefits are being terminated), which is what gives rise to the obligation to repay. The instruction announces that the Social Security Commissioner has adopted a "new policy" whereby the month of cessation will ordinarily be no earlier than the month in which the beneficiary receives notice that his benefits are being terminated--that is, there will be no retroactive cessation--except in specified circumstances, such as when "the cessation was based on work activity." Attached to the instruction is a notice that the administrative law judges are directed to send to the beneficiary in every pending case involving retroactive cessation in which a hearing has not yet been held. The notice informs the beneficiary of the new policy, recomputes the amount of benefits (if any) that the beneficiary will have to repay under the new policy if he loses his case, and provides a form on which he can "withdraw my request for a hearing on the termination of my disability benefits, because of the revision in the date on which my disability was found to have ceased." Presumably the idea behind the new policy is that many challenges to terminations of benefits are motivated by the beneficiary's unhappiness at being ordered to pay back benefits already received and spent, so that a more forgiving policy on repayment might cause many of those challenges to be abandoned.
Assuming--as we must to bring the question of standing into sharp focus--that the instruction and accompanying notice violate the Social Security Act, we must consider whether administrative law judges, to whom the instruction was addressed, have standing to bring a federal court suit to enjoin its enforcement.
Like anyone else, a judge has standing to complain of the usual sorts of injury, actual or threatened, for which courts provide a remedy. If the chief administrative law judge told these plaintiffs that he was reducing their salaries or fringe benefits they would have standing to sue just as the federal judges had standing to sue when Congress cancelled a pay raise for them in violation of Article III of the Constitution. See Will v. United States, 449 U.S. 200, 101 S.Ct. 471, 66 L.Ed.2d 392 (1980). And if he said that instead of reducing their pay or benefits he was increasing their hours, they might have standing to complain of this too, since an increase in hours worked is a reduction in hourly pay for people who are paid on an annual rather than hourly basis. No doubt some impairments of job amenities are so trivial that the maxim de minimis non curat lex would bar suit; reducing the temperature of the workplace to a level that was uncomfortable but not intolerable might be an example. But this does not affect the basic principle that reducing an administrative law judge's compensation does him a sufficient injury to confer standing to sue.
But the instruction in question did not reduce the pay or benefits of these administrative law judges or even the temperature in their offices, and if anything it will lighten their workload by inducing some recipients to accept the termination of their benefits without a contest. The instruction did, however, truncate the administrative law judges' adjudicative discretion. Previously the date of cessation had been a fact that the administrative law judge found by weighing the evidence. The instruction removed the date from the realm of fact by making it in the usual case no earlier than when the recipient was sent notice of termination, even though he must in fact have ceased being disabled earlier, since the government would not send a notice of termination until it had in hand evidence of cessation. Discretion is power, a commodity that judges, like other people, prize. A reduction in discretion is a reduction in an important though nonpecuniary form of compensation for a judge.
But the requirement of standing is more than just a screen to keep out cases so trivial that they are not worth the time of an Article III judge, or so inconsequential to one or both of the parties that they are unlikely to invest sufficient resources in its litigation to give the court all the information it needs for an intelligent decision. The concept has always served other policies as well, relating to the suitability of allowing particular disputes to be litigated. See 13 Wright, Miller & Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure Sec. 3531 at pp. 228-33 (1975). Maybe these...
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