Territory of Guam v. Olsen
| Decision Date | 23 May 1977 |
| Docket Number | No. 76-439,76-439 |
| Citation | 52 L.Ed.2d 250,97 S.Ct. 1774,431 U.S. 195 |
| Parties | TERRITORY OF GUAM, Petitioner, v. Edmund J. OLSEN |
| Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
Provision of § 22 of the 1950 Organic Act of Guam that the District Court of Guam "shall have such appellate jurisdiction as the (Guam) legislature may determine" held not to authorize the Guam Legislature to divest the District Court's appellate jurisdiction under the Act to hear appeals from local Guam courts, and to transfer that jurisdiction to the newly created Guam Supreme Court, but to empower the legislature to "determine" that jurisdiction only in the sense of the selection of what should constitute appealable causes. This conclusion is supported not only by the text of § 22, which expressly authorizes only a "transfer" of the District Court's original local jurisdiction, but also by the absence of any clear signal from Congress that it intended to allow the Guam Legislature to foreclose appellate review by Art. III courts, including this Court, of territorial courts' decisions in federal-question cases; by the Act's legislative history; and by the fact that if the word "determine" were read as giving Guam the power to transfer the District Court's appellate jurisdiction to the Guam Supreme Court and at the same time to authorize Guam to deny review of the District Court's decisions by any Art. III tribunal, Congress would have given Guam a power not granted to any other Territory. Pp. 199-204.
540 F.2d 1011, affirmed.
Charles H. Troutman, III, Agana, Guam, for the petitioner.
Howard G. Trapp, Agana, Guam, for the respondent.
Walter S. Ferenz, Agana, Guam, for the Guam Bar Association, as amicus curiae, by special leave of Court.
The question for decision in this case is whether the provision of § 22 of the 1950 Organic Act of Guam that the District Court of Guam "shall have such appellate jurisdiction as the (Guam) legislature may determine" authorizes the Legislature of Guam to divest the appellate jurisdiction of the District Court under the Act to hear appeals from local Guam courts, and to transfer that jurisdiction to the Supreme Court of Guam, newly created by the Guam Legislature.
Section 22(a) of the Organic Act, 64 Stat. 389, before an amendment not relevant here, provided:
1 (Emphasis supplied.)
In 1951, under the authority of the Organic Act, the Guam Legislature created three local courts for local matters and defined cases appealable from those courts to the District Court.2 That structure continued without substantial change for 23 years until 1974 when the Guam Legislature adopted the Court Reorganization Act of 1974. Guam Pub.L. 12-85. The former Island, Police, and Commissioners' Courts, were replaced by a Guam Superior Court with "original jurisdiction in all cases arising under the laws of Guam, civil or criminal, in law or equity, regardless of the amount in controversy, except for causes arising under the Constitution, treaties, laws of the United States and any matter involving the Guam Territorial Income Tax." 3 The Act also repealed the provisions of the Guam Code of Civil Procedure governing appeals to the District Court,4 and created the Supreme Court of Guam. The Act transferred to the Supreme Court essentially the same appellate jurisdiction as had previously been exercised by the District Court, providing that the Supreme Court "shall have jurisdiction of appeals from the judgments, orders and decrees of the Superior Court in criminal causes . . . and in civil cases." Pub.L. 12-85, § 3. Other provisions of the Reorganization Act amended various territorial laws to change the references to the Supreme Court of Guam from the Appellate Division of the District Court as the appellate court.
Respondent was convicted of criminal charges in the Superior Court, and appealed to the District Court of Guam. The District Court dismissed the appeal on the authority of a divided panel decision of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit holding that the 1974 Court Reorganization Act validly divested the District Court of its appellate jurisdiction and transferred that jurisdiction to the newly created Supreme Court. Agana Bay Dev. Co. (Hong Kong) Ltd. v. Supreme Ct. of Guam, 529 F.2d 952 (1976). In this case, however, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, overruled en banc 5 the panel decision in Agana Bay, and reversed the dismissal of respondent's appeal. 540 F.2d 1011 (1976). The Court of Appeals held that "the appellate jurisdiction of the district court may not be transferred without congressional authorization and pursuant to such provisions and safeguards as Congress may provide." Id., at 1012. Certain judgments of the appellate division of the District Court were made appealable to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and to this Court, by § 23 of the Organic Act of Guam of 1950, as amended, 65 Stat. 726,6 but Congress has not similarly provided for appeals from judgments of the Supreme Court of Guam. In that circumstance, the Court of Appeals held that § 22(a) did not authorize the transfer of the District Court's appellate jurisdiction to the Supreme Court of Guam because, under existing statutes "litigation in the territorial court (that) may involve substantial federal questions . . . cannot be reviewed by the United States Supreme Court or by any other Article III court . . .." 540 F.2d, at 1012. We granted certiorari, 429 U.S. 959, 97 S.Ct. 380, 50 L.Ed.2d 325 (1976). We affirm.
We emphasize at the outset that the 1974 Court Reorganization Act in no respect affects the exclusive 7 original federal- question jurisdiction of the District Court granted by the first clause of the second sentence of § 22(a), which now provides that the "District Court of Guam shall have the jurisdiction of a district court of the United States in all causes arising under the constitution, treaties, and laws of the United States . . .." 48 U.S.C. § 1424(a). Decisions in such cases brought in the District Court are appealable to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit or to this Court. 8 The question presented for decision here rather concerns appeals to the District Court from decisions of local courts in cases arising under local law. The language we must construe immediately follows in the same sentence, providing that the District Court "shall have original jurisdiction in all other causes in Guam, jurisdiction over which has not been transferred by the legislature to other court or courts established by it, and shall have such appellate jurisdiction as the legislature may determine." (Emphasis supplied.)
We first observe that Congress used different language in its grant of power to the Guam Legislature over the District Court's original jurisdiction from its grant of power over that court's appellate jurisdiction. The Act expressly provides that original jurisdiction might be "transferred " to "other court or courts" created by the legislature. As to appellate jurisdiction, however, the wording is that the District Court "shall have such appellate jurisdiction as the legislature may determine." The question immediately arises why, if Congress contemplated authority to eliminate the District Court's appellate jurisdiction by transferring it to a local court, Congress did not, as in the case of "original jurisdiction," explicitly provide that appellate jurisdiction too might be "transferred." Moreover, if Congress contemplated such a broad grant of authority, it might be expected that it would have referred, as in the case of original jurisdiction, to "other court or courts" that would be established to assume the appellate jurisdiction transferred from the District Court. Clearly, the word "determine" is not used as a synonym for "transfer," and it is not obvious that the power to "determine" the appellate jurisdiction of the District Court includes the power to abolish it by "transfer" to another court. We fully agree with Judge Kennedy dissenting in Agana Bay, 529 F.2d, at 959, that Congress used "determine" because Congress "more likely intended to permit the local legislature to decide what cases were serious enough to be appealable," and we note that the Guam Legislature found no broader authority in the term for the 23 years from 1951 to 1974. We therefore conclude that Congress expressly authorized a "transfer" of the District Court's original jurisdiction but withheld a like power respecting the court's appellate jurisdiction, empowering Guam to "determine" the District Court's appellate jurisdiction only in the sense of the selection of what should constitute appealable causes.9
Other considerations besides our reading of the bare text support the conclusion that the power to "determine" should not be construed to include the power to "transfer" without more persuasive indicia of a congressional purpose to clothe the Guam Legislature with this authority.
First, we should be reluctant without a clear signal from Congress to conclude that it intended to...
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