Johnson v. Ala. Sec'y of Labor Fitzgerald Wash.

• Docket Number: SC-2022-0897
• Decision Date: 30 June 2023
• Parties: Aaron Johnson, Nancy Williams, Derek Bateman, Jack Ficaro, Dashonda Bennett, Latisha Kali, Quinton Lee, Esta Glass, Joyce Jones, Deja Bush, Jarvis Dean, Taja Penn, Lisa Cormier, Mia Brand, Tammy Cowart, John Young, Mark Johnson, Latara Jackson, Senata Waters, Raymond Williams, Cynthia Hawkins, Crystal Harris, Rashunda Williams, and Mary Blackerby v. Alabama Secretary of Labor Fitzgerald Washington
• Court: Alabama Supreme Court

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Aaron Johnson, Nancy Williams, Derek Bateman, Jack Ficaro, Dashonda Bennett, Latisha Kali, Quinton Lee, Esta Glass, Joyce Jones, Deja Bush, Jarvis Dean, Taja Penn, Lisa Cormier, Mia Brand, Tammy Cowart, John Young, Mark Johnson, Latara Jackson, Senata Waters, Raymond Williams, Cynthia Hawkins, Crystal Harris, Rashunda Williams, and Mary Blackerby v. Alabama Secretary of Labor Fitzgerald Washington

No. SC-2022-0897

Supreme Court of Alabama

June 30, 2023

Appeal from Montgomery Circuit Court (CV-22-900134) MITCHELL, Justice.

With the onset of COVID-19, the Alabama Department of Labor received a record number of applications for unemployment benefits. To be precise, Alabamians filed nearly 1.5 million such applications with the Department between April 2020 and March 2022, far above the 737 applications that had been filed in May 2019, before the onset of COVID-19. Unsurprisingly, the Department struggled to process the additional million-plus applications in a timely fashion. The plaintiffs-appellants in this case, whom we refer to simply as "the plaintiffs,"^[1] are among the many individuals who experienced delays in the handling of their applications. Early last year, they brought this lawsuit in the Montgomery Circuit Court in an effort to jumpstart the administrative-approval process. In their operative joint complaint, each plaintiff has raised multiple claims for relief, all of which seek to compel the Alabama Secretary of Labor, Fitzgerald Washington to improve the speed and manner in which the Department processes their applications for unemployment benefits.

Secretary Washington responded to the suit by asking the circuit court to dismiss all claims against him, arguing (among other things) that the circuit court lacked jurisdiction over the suit because the plaintiffs had not yet exhausted mandatory administrative remedies. After the circuit court granted that motion, the plaintiffs appealed to this Court. For the reasons given below, we agree with Secretary Washington that the Legislature has prohibited courts from exercising jurisdiction over the plaintiffs' claims at this stage. We therefore affirm the circuit court's judgment of dismissal.

Facts and Procedural History

This suit began when 26 plaintiffs filed a complaint and motion for injunctive relief against Secretary Washington and the Department, with each plaintiff pleading numerous claims related to the Department's handling of their unemployment-benefits applications. In essence, each of the plaintiffs had filed one or more applications for benefits and was unsatisfied with how the Department handled (or failed to handle) those applications. After Secretary Washington and the Department moved to dismiss the complaint against them the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint, which dropped several of their initial claims and also dropped the Department as a defendant.

The surviving counts -- all of which are federal claims brought under the Civil Rights Act of 1871, 42 U.S.C. § 1983 -- alleged that Secretary Washington's "policies, practices, and procedures" related to "unemployment compensation applications" violated the Social Security Act of 1935, 42 U.S.C. § 503(a)(1), as well as the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Each plaintiff demanded several forms of relief, including: (1) a permanent injunction directing Secretary Washington to "promptly make decisions on all applications" for unemployment compensation; (2) a preliminary injunction directing Secretary Washington to "issue an initial nonmonetary decision within the next ten days to every plaintiff who has not yet received a decision"; (3) a permanent injunction directing Secretary Washington to "pay every [unemployment-benefit] claim that has been approved within two days of the date of approval"; (4) a permanent injunction requiring Secretary Washington to provide any claimants who request a hearing confirmation of the request and to "schedule a date not more than 90 days later than the request for the hearing"; (5) a preliminary injunction directing Secretary Washington to "provide within ten days a hearing date for each of the plaintiffs who have requested a hearing"; (6) a permanent injunction directing Secretary Washington to provide "all information about the unemployment compensation program and all notices to claimants using language and format making them easily read and understood by people with an eighth grade education"; (7) a preliminary injunction compelling Secretary Washington "within two weeks to file a plan for rewriting notices and information sheets to ensure that they can be easily read and understood by people with an eighth grade education"; and (8) an order awarding the plaintiffs attorney fees.

Secretary Washington again moved to dismiss, arguing that the circuit court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction (on a variety of theories), that the plaintiffs lacked a private cause of action, and that the plaintiffs' claims were substantively meritless. The circuit court granted Secretary Washington's motion without specifying the ground on which it based its dismissal. The plaintiffs promptly filed a motion to alter, amend, or vacate the judgment of dismissal, which the circuit court denied. The plaintiffs then timely appealed to this Court.

Standard of Review

We review a circuit court's judgment of dismissal de novo, regardless of whether the judgment was entered under Rule 12(b)(1), Ala. R. Civ. P., for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, or under Rule 12(b)(6), Ala. R. Civ. P., for failure to state a claim. See DuBose v. Weaver, 68 So.3d 814, 821 (Ala. 2011); Bay Lines, Inc. v. Stoughton Trailers, Inc., 838 So.2d 1013, 1017-18 (Ala. 2002).

Analysis

The parties' positions in this appeal largely track their arguments before the circuit court. Namely, Secretary Washington argues that this Court and the circuit court lack subject-matter jurisdiction over the claims listed in the amended complaint because, he contends: several of those claims have become moot in the time since the suit was filed; the Social Security Act claims are barred by the doctrine of State immunity; some of the plaintiffs lack standing (for various reasons) to seek the type of relief demanded in the amended complaint; and the Alabama Legislature has prohibited courts from hearing claims related to the making of determinations for unemployment-compensation benefits unless the claimants have first exhausted the Department of Labor's internal administrative-review process. He further maintains that the plaintiffs lack a private cause of action to enforce their Social Security Act claims and that -- even leaving aside the private-cause-of-action issue -- all the plaintiffs' claims fail on the merits as a matter of law. The plaintiffs, for their part, dispute each of these contentions and argue that the circuit court committed reversible error by accepting any of them.

We address the jurisdictional disputes first because, absent subjectmatter jurisdiction, we have no authority to reach the merits. See McElroy v. McElroy, 254 So.3d 872, 875 (Ala. 2017). While we must resolve all jurisdictional questions before any merits issues, id., in situations where we are faced with multiple jurisdictional questions at once, we may choose to decide them in any order, see Ruhrgas AG v. Marathon Oil Co., 526 U.S. 574, 584 (1999); Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Env't, 523 U.S. 83, 100 n.3 (1998). In this case, we begin by asking whether the Legislature has prohibited courts from exercising jurisdiction over unexhausted claims related to a plaintiff's pursuit of unemployment-compensation benefits, because that is the only jurisdictional question that applies to all the claims brought by all the plaintiffs. And because we ultimately agree with Secretary Washington that the Legislature has prohibited courts from exercising jurisdiction over such claims, we end our inquiry there as well.

To understand how and why the Legislature has barred State courts from exercising jurisdiction over the types of claims at issue here, it helps to understand how unemployment-compensation benefits developed in this State. Alabama's unemployment-compensation scheme was first enacted in 1935. Tennessee Coal, Iron &R.R. Co. v. Martin, 251 Ala. 153, 154, 36 So.2d 547, 548 (1948). At the time, there was little precedent for such a program; indeed, Alabama was among the first States in the nation to experiment with one. See id. (describing Wisconsin as the only State to have adopted an unemploymentcompensation scheme prior to Alabama's). Unemployment compensation is thus "a creature of statute" alone; it does not correspond to any traditional private right and was "unknown at common law."^[2] Quick v. Utotem of Alabama, Inc., 365 So.2d 1245, 1247 (Ala. Civ. App. 1979).

When the Legislature creates a new type of claim in derogation of the common law -- as it has done with unemployment compensation -the procedure for pursuing such a claim is "completely governed by statute." Quick, 365 So.2d at 1247 (citing Ex parte Miles, 248 Ala. 386, 27 So.2d 777 (1946)). A related principle is that when a statutory scheme gives rise to entitlements or other franchises unknown at common law, the ordinary presumption in favor of judicial review for claims related to those benefits does not apply -- which is why courts in such contexts typically construe jurisdictional grants narrowly and jurisdictional limitations broadly. See Birmingham Elec. Co. v. Alabama Pub. Serv. Comm'n, 254 Ala. 119, 125, 47 So.2d 449, 452 (1950). Those complementary principles guide our analysis in this case.

As relevant here, when the Legislature enacted the statutory scheme creating unemployment benefits for...