King v. St Vincent Hospital

Decision Date16 December 1991
Docket NumberNo. 90-889,90-889
PartiesWilliam "Sky" KING, Petitioner v. ST. VINCENT'S HOSPITAL
CourtU.S. Supreme Court
Syllabus

Petitioner King, a National Guard member, advised his civilian employer, respondent St. Vincent's Hospital, that he had accepted a 3-year full-time appointment with the Guard, and requested a leave of absence from his hospital job as ostensibly guaranteed by 38 U.S.C. § 2024(d), the statute which provides reemployment rights to service personnel in King's position. St. Vincent's denied King's request and brought suit in the District Court, seeking a declaratory judgment that the Act does not provide reemployment rights after tours of duty as long as King's. The court granted the requested relief, ruling that service of the type in question was protected by § 2024(d), but holding, under Circuit precedent, that leave requests under that subsection must be reasonable, and that King's request for a 3-year leave was per se unreasonable. A panel of the Court of Appeals affirmed.

Held: Section 2024(d) does not limit the length of military service after which a member of the Armed Forces retains a right to civilian reemployment. Subsection (d)'s text—which specifies that any covered employee "shall . . . be granted a leave . . . for the period required to perform active duty [and] [u]pon . . . release from . . . such duty . . . shall be permitted to return to [his or her] position"—is utterly silent about any durational limit on the protection it provides. Reading the statute as a whole, it must be inferred that the unqualified nature of subsection (d)'s protection was deliberate, since other subsections of § 2024, protecting other classes of full-time service personnel, expressly limit the periods of their protection. St. Vincent's argument that such limits reflect a hierarchy of reemployment rights—under which reservists subject to duty under subsection (d) are entitled to the least protection and are therefore subject to an imprecise durational limit of reasonableness—is unconvincing because its conclusion rests on circular reasoning, requiring the assumption of the point at issue: that § 2024(d) reservists really do get less protection than the inductees, enlistees, and other veterans covered by the other subsections. Pp. 218-223.

901 F.2d 1068, (CA 11 1990), reversed and remanded.

SOUTER, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which all other Members joined, except THOMAS, J., who took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

Amy L. Wax, Washington, D.C., for petitioner.

Harry L. Hopkins, Birmingham, Ala., for respondent.

Justice SOUTER delivered the opinion of the Court.

The issue in this case is whether 38 U.S.C. § 2024(d), a provision of what is popularly known as the Veterans' Reemployment Rights Act, implicitly limits the length of military service after which a member of the Armed Forces retains a right to civilian reemployment. We hold that it does not.

I

In June 1987, petitioner William "Sky" King,1 a member of the Alabama National Guard,2 applied to become Command Sergeant Major in the Active Guard/Reserve (AGR) program, and thereby undertook to serve the 3-year tour of duty required by Army regulations 3 of the person holding that position.4 The next month King learned of his selection and advised his employer, respondent St. Vincent's Hospital, that he had accepted the Guard's 3-year full-time appointment. He requested a leave of absence from his hospital job as ostensibly guaranteed by the Act and reported for military duty, as ordered, on August 17. Several weeks later, St. Vincent's advised him that his request was unreasonable and thus beyond the Act's guarantee.

After so informing King, St. Vincent's took the further step of bringing a declaratory judgment action in the United States District Court for the District of Northern Alabama to settle the issue whether the applicable terms of the Act provided reemployment rights after tours of duty as long as King's. Although the court held that service in the AGR program carried protection under § 2024(d),5 it nonetheless rendered declaratory judgment for St. Vincent's on the ground that the request for a 3-year leave of absence was per se unreasonable. In imposing a test of reasonableness on King's request, the District Court was following the opinion of the Eleventh Circuit in Gulf States Paper Corp. v. Ingram, 811 F.2d 1464, 1468 (1987), which had in turn interpreted a Fifth Circuit case as requiring that leave requests for protection under § 2024(d) must be reasonable. See Lee v. Pensacola, 634 F.2d 886, 889 (1981).6 A panel of the Eleventh Circuit affirmed, with two judges agreeing with the District Court that guaranteeing reemployment after a 3-year tour of duty would be per se unreasonable, thereby putting King outside the protection of § 2024(d). 901 F.2d 1068 (1990). Judge Roney concurred separately that King's request was unreasonable, but dissented from the creation of a per se rule. Id., at 1072-1073.

Like the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, the Third has engrafted a reasonableness requirement onto § 2024(d). Eidukonis v. Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, 873 F.2d 688, 694 (1989).7 The Fourth Circuit, on the other hand, has declined to do so. Kolkhorst v. Tilghman, 897 F.2d 1282, 1286 (1990), cert. pending, No. 89-1949. We granted certiorari to resolve this conflict, 498 U.S. ----, 111 S.Ct. 950, 112 L.Ed.2d 1039 (1991), and now reverse the judgment of the Eleventh Circuit.

II

We start with the text of § 2024(d), see Schreiber v. Burlington Northern, Inc., 472 U.S. 1, 5, 105 S.Ct. 2458, 2461, 86 L.Ed.2d 1 (1985), which is free of any express conditions upon the provisions in contention here:

[Any covered person] shall upon request be granted a leave of absence by such person's employer for the period required to perform active duty for training or inactive duty training in the Armed Forces of the United States. Upon such employee's release from a period of such . . . [duty] . . . such employee shall be permitted to return to such employee's position with such seniority, status, pay, and vacation as such employee would have had if such employee had not been absent for such purposes. 38 U.S.C. § 2024(d) (1988 ed.).

Thus, the Fourth Circuit could call the subsection's guarantee of leave and reemployment "unequivocal and unqualified," Kolkhorst, supra, at 1286, and the Eleventh Circuit itself observed that the subsection "does not address the 'reasonableness' of a reservist's leave request." Gulf States, supra, at 1468.

Although St. Vincent's recognizes the importance of the statute's freedom from provisos, see Brief for Respondent 9, it still argues that the text of subsection (d) favors its position. The hospital stresses that "leave" as used in subsection (d) is to be enjoyed by an "employee," whose status as such implies that the employment relationship continues during the absence. Accordingly, employees protected under subsection (d) are "returned" to their positions after military service is over, while reservists protected by other subsections of § 2024 are "restored" to theirs,8 the difference in language attesting that the former remain employees, while the latter cease to be such during their time away. The hospital argues that the very notion of such a continuing relationship is incompatible with absences as lengthy as King's, and finds that conclusion supported by the provisions speaking to the actual mechanics for resuming employment. While the reservists subject to other subsections must reapply for employment, those protected by subsection (d) are allowed, and indeed required, to "report for work at the beginning of the next regularly scheduled working period" after the tour of military duty expires. The hospital posits the impracticality of expecting an employee to report for work immediately after a 3-year absence, "to take his apron off the peg," as the hospital's counsel put it, and go back to work as if nothing had happened. It also makes much of the difficulties of filling responsible positions that would follow if their incumbents could be turned out so abruptly after serving for so long, upon the prior incumbent's equally abrupt return.

__________

8. Subsections (a), (b), (c), and (g) identify other classes of reservists, enlistees, and those called to active duty, and make applicable to those classes the reemployment protection offered inductees pursuant to 38 U.S.C. § 2021(a)(2)(A)(ii), namely, "restor[ation]" to the formerly held position "or to a position of like seniority, status, and pay."

To these arguments, and others like them that we do not set out at length, two replies are in order. We may grant that the congressionally mandated leave of absence can be an ungainly perquisite of military service, when the tour of duty lasts as long as King's promises to do, and if we were free to tinker with the statutory scheme we could reasonably accord some significance to the burdens imposed on both employers and workers when long leaves of absence are the chosen means of guaranteeing eventual reemployment to military personnel.

But to grant all this is not to find equivocation in the statute's silence, so as to render it susceptible to interpretive choice. On the contrary, the verbal distinctions underlying the hospital's arguments become pallid in the light of a textual difference far more glaring than any of them: while, as noted, subsection (d) is utterly silent about any durational limit on the protection it provides, other subsections of § 2024, protecting other classes of full-time service personnel, expressly limit the periods of their protection. Thus, § 2024(a) currently gives enlistees at least four years of reemployment protection, with the possibility of an extension to five years and even longer. Again, for example, § 2024(b)(1) extends protection to those entering active duty (except for ...

To continue reading

Request your trial
485 cases
  • Cage v. Davis (In re Giant Gray, Inc.)
    • United States
    • United States Bankruptcy Courts. Fifth Circuit. U.S. Bankruptcy Court — Southern District of Texas
    • October 22, 2020
    ...(emphasis added).239 Id . § 550(a)(1).240 20-3129, ECF No. 1 at 6.241 20-3127, ECF No. 1 at 6–7.242 King v. St. Vincent's Hosp. , 502 U.S. 215, 221, 112 S.Ct. 570, 116 L.Ed.2d 578 (1991) (citations omitted).243 11 U.S.C. § 550(b) ("The trustee may not recover under section (a)(2) of this se......
  • Ohio VALLEY Envtl. Coal. INC. v. COAL-MAC INC.
    • United States
    • U.S. District Court — Southern District of West Virginia
    • March 31, 2011
    ...Holloway v. United States, 526 U.S. 1, 7 (1999) (quoting Brown v. Gardner, 513 U.S. 115, 118 (1994) (quoting King v. St. Vincent's Hosp., 502 U.S. 215, 221 (1991))); see also, Ide, 624 F.3d at 668 ("[A court's] analysis of particular statutory language also is informed by 'the specific cont......
  • Satcher v. Netherland
    • United States
    • U.S. District Court — Eastern District of Virginia
    • October 8, 1996
    ...courts are instructed to construe statutes as a whole and in such a way as to avoid absurd results. See King v. St. Vincent's Hosp., 502 U.S. 215, 112 S.Ct. 570, 116 L.Ed.2d 578 (1991) (statute to be read as a whole, because meaning of statutory language depends on context); Crandon v. Unit......
  • United States v. Louisiana
    • United States
    • U.S. District Court — Middle District of Louisiana
    • July 26, 2016
    ...one" in Section 7(a)(6). Ga. State Conf. of NAACP, 841 F. Supp. 2d at 1331; see also, e.g., King v. St. Vincent's Hosp., 502 U.S. 215, 222, 112 S. Ct. 570, 575, 116 L. Ed. 2d 578, 587-88 (1991); Zabielski v. Montgomery Ward & Co., 919 F.2d 1276, 1279 (7th Cir. 1990). Significantly, this res......
  • Request a trial to view additional results
1 firm's commentaries
5 books & journal articles
  • Reemployment rights for the guard and reserve: will civilian employers pay the price for national defense?
    • United States
    • Air Force Law Review No. 59, March 2007
    • March 22, 2007
    ...(2006). (116) Wedlund, supra note 13, at 817. (117) See Manson, supra note 16, at 88 n.81. (118) King v. St. Vincent's Hospital, 502 U.S. 215, 222 (119) 38 U.S.C. § 4312(a)(3) (2006). (120) Id. § 4312(e)(1)(A)(i). (121) See, H.R. REP. 103-65(1). supra note 61. at 29. (122) Gordon v. Wawa, I......
  • TEXTUALISM AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURE ACT.
    • United States
    • Notre Dame Law Review Vol. 98 No. 5, June 2023
    • June 1, 2023
    ...Peter & Paul Home v. Pennsylvania, 140 S. Ct. 2367 (2020), discussed in Section LLC. infra. (22) See King v. St. Vincent's Hosp., 502 U.S. 215, 221 (1991) ("Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition; they have only a communal existence; and not only does the meaning of each interpene......
  • DENYING FIFTH AMENDMENT PROTECTIONS TO WITNESSES FACING FOREIGN PROSECUTIONS: SELF-INCRIMINATION DISCRIMINATION?
    • United States
    • Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Vol. 89 No. 3, March 1999
    • March 22, 1999
    ...for public use, without just compensation. U.S. CONST., amend. V. (195) Balsys, 118 S. Ct. at 2223 (citing King v. St. Vincent's Hospital, 502 U.S. 215, 221 (196) Id. at 2223. (197) Id. (198) The clause purports to apply to "any" criminal case. See supra note 194. (199) Balsys, 118 S. Ct. a......
  • Dynamic Statutory Interpretation.
    • United States
    • University of Pennsylvania Law Review Vol. 143 No. 6, June - June - June 1995
    • June 1, 1995
    ...that interpretive doubts should be resolved in favor of a veteran, see Gardner, 115 S. Ct. at 555 (citing King v. St. Vincent's Hosp., 502 U.S. 215,220 n.9 (1991)), but it did not rely on that canon in reaching its decision. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal circuit, howeve......
  • Request a trial to view additional results

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT