Logan v. Zimmerman Brush Co.

In 1961 the Illinois legislature passed the state's Fair Employment Practices Act (FEPA).^[3] It created the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), an administrative body empowered to hear and resolve complaints of employment discrimination in all categories protected by law.^[4] Early in its existence it incurred the wrath of large businesses; in 1964 Motorola offered to pay the legal bills of any small businesses in the state facing proceedings before the FEPC after it spent $200,000 fighting a decision to award $1,000 to an unsuccessful applicant.^[5] In 1975 the legislature added disability to the law's protected classes, but made FEPC the exclusive venue for resolving those complaints.^{[6]: 25–26}

The FEPA set a deadline of 180 days from the alleged offense for complaints to be brought, and required only that FEPC notify any employer of a complaint against them within 120 days. After the state's Supreme Court held in its 1978 case Springfield-Sangamon County Regional Plan Commission v. Fair Employment Practices Commission that the deadlines were mandatory, not merely directory,^[7] the statute was amended to require that FEPC convene a fact-finding conference with the parties within the 120-day deadline, to promote speedier resolution of complaints and encourage negotiated settlements.^[8] In 1979, in a suit against FEPC brought by Chicago State University and another employer after the commission had waited two years to inform the latter of a pending complaint against it, the state Supreme Court not only reaffirmed its earlier ruling but clarified that if FEPC failed to notify the employer within 180 days of receiving the complaint, it lost jurisdiction permanently.^[9]

Underlying dispute

In early October 1979 Laverne L. Logan was hired by the Zimmerman Brush Co., a Chicago manufacturer.^[4][10][a] According to the company's lawyer, at that time it was fully aware that Logan's left leg was several inches shorter than his right. Zimmerman tried to accommodate him by assigning him first to the shipping room, and then to work on a machine where he could sit.^{[6]: 25–26}

After a month, while he was still in his probationary period and thus not yet covered by the union contract,^{[6]: 25–26} the company let Logan go since he was unable to perform his duties satisfactorily. Five days later, on November 14, Logan, on his own, filed a complaint with Illinois's Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), alleging that he had been fired because of his physical disability in violation of state law.^[4][8]

In late January 1980 FEPC mailed to both Logan and Zimmerman notice that it had scheduled that conference for March 18. The company was also asked to complete and return a two-page questionnaire about its personnel practices and the circumstances of Logan's termination by March 10, which it did. At the conference, Zimmerman moved to dismiss Logan's complaint on the grounds that, since FEPC had mistakenly scheduled the conference for five days after the 120-day deadline had expired, it was no longer valid. FEPC denied the motion, so the company petitioned the Supreme Court of Illinois for a writ of prohibition barring FEPC from taking any further action; it granted a stay pending resolution of the case. Logan retained counsel and, since the six-month period for him to file a complaint had not yet lapsed, refiled.^[4]

In response, the legislature again amended FEPA to allow for the conference to take place after the 120-day deadline if both parties agreed. It took effect in July of that year.^[11]

Supreme Court of Illinois

The court unanimously held for Zimmerman in a late September decision. It conceded that the use of "shall" in the statute did not, by itself, make its provisions mandatory.^[b] "One must consider the word within the context of the entire statute, looking particularly to the purpose of the legislation", wrote Justice Daniel P. Ward for his colleagues. Since that language had in earlier cases been held to mandate an action, it was presumed that the legislature knew this and intended that construction.^[13]

The commission attempted to distinguish Springfield-Sangamon by noting that its delay in bringing that case had been found to have had the potential to cost the employer considerable sums of money in back pay and fines, which would not have been the case here. The court responded that FEPC was reading that decision too narrowly and ignored the purpose of the conference, as clarified by the 1978 amendment, to provide an opportunity for speedy resolution of the complaint (perhaps through a negotiated settlement), save all parties time and money, and protect employers from frivolous complaints. "Without a required fact-finding conference the Commission would in most instances have to proceed solely on the basis of the employee's charge", Ward wrote. "Unless the Commission would be able to obtain information regarding the charge from some independent investigation its decision of whether or not to file a complaint would hardly be an informed one."^[13]

The court also found unpersuasive arguments by the commission and Logan that, by submitting the completed questionnaire and attending the conference, Zimmerman had waived any standing to move to have the charge dismissed on grounds of failure to proceed in a timely fashion. By doing so, Ward noted, it had merely been complying with the commission's request and thus the law; to not do so would have made it equally responsible for the delay of the conference. The record also did not reflect any awareness on the company's part that it was aware at that time that the conference had been scheduled too late.^[14]

Logan raised three additional arguments; the court rejected all of them. His equal protection and due process rights could not have been violated since the legislature had created reasonable procedures for the resolution of employment discrimination complaints, which had been followed. The amendment to FEPA that would have allowed the parties to waive the deadline was not explicitly worded to be retroactive. And since FEPC had otherwise processed his first complaint in compliance with the law, he could not be allowed to file a second one. Under the circumstances, "[n]ot only would an employer's rights be prejudiced if an employee were allowed to file a second and successive charge, but also the public interest in promoting an expeditious resolution of charges would be circumvented", Ward wrote.^[14]

U.S. Supreme Court

Logan petitioned the

Afterwards, Jay Canel argued for Zimmerman. Justice Thurgood Marshall questioned why the company had taken the case this far, since it might otherwise have long since settled with Logan. Canel agreed, telling Justice William Rehnquist that his client felt the same way at that point but had earlier followed the advice of previous counsel that had advised him to assert his rights under the law. Justice John Paul Stevens saw "a real equal protection concern" with the 120-day deadline, since it might both allow claimants with spurious claims to get the full process while those with legitimate ones would not. Questioning Canel closely about what sort of post-deprivation remedies might still be available to Logan should the Court rule in Zimmerman's favor, since only the commission could order him reinstated, he asked Canel if he was arguing that there could never be a due process violation in litigation between private parties. Specifically Stevens brought up Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co.,^[19] where the statutory notice provisions related to the suit were held deficient enough to be a due process violation. Canel said that while he did not think that, he believed Logan could still get economic restitution from the state through either the Illinois Court of Claims or a Section 1983 suit.^{[6]: 32–49}

Decision

The Court issued its opinion in late March 1982. Unanimously, it had agreed with Logan that his rights had been violated by the process. In what way, and to what extent, it offered three different opinions. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote for the Court that Logan's due process rights had been violated.^[20] In an unusual^[1] separate concurrence joined by three other justices, he argued that the statute failed the rational basis test and thus denied Logan equal protection of the laws.^[21] Justice Lewis Powell agreed with the latter point, but would have limited the holding to the facts specific to the case.^[22]

Opinion of the Court

"At the outset," Blackmun wrote after summarizing the facts of the case, "we are faced with what has become a familiar two-part inquiry: we must determine whether Logan was deprived of a protected interest, and, if so, what process was his due." Mullane, where a requirement that publication in a newspaper was held a constitutionally inadequate level of notice to the beneficiaries of a common

And precedents even older than Mullane supported the protection of litigants' claims by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. In 1971's Boddie v. Connecticut,^[24] filing fees for indigent defendants which prevented them from beginning divorce actions were held to violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. "The hallmark of property, the Court has emphasized, is an individual entitlement grounded in state law, which cannot be removed except 'for cause,'" Blackmun explained. "Once that characteristic is found, the types of interests protected as 'property' are varied and, as often as not, intangible, relating 'to the whole domain of social and economic fact.'"^[25][d]

"A claimant has more than an abstract desire or interest in redressing his grievance: his right to redress is guaranteed by the State, with the adequacy of his claim assessed under what is, in essence, a 'for cause' standard, based upon the substantiality of the evidence", Blackmun continued. Among the many things the Court had found to be protected property interests under the Due Process Clause were a horse trainer's license, he noted, referring to Barry v. Barchi,^[27] a 1979 case where the Court had held that New York had unconstitutionally suspended one after the horse had tested positive for banned substances after a race without guaranteeing the trainer a prompt adversarial hearing to offer a defense. It would take a "remarkable reading" of the Court's precedent, Blackmun wrote, "to conclude that a horse trainer's license is a protected property interest under the Fourteenth Amendment, while a state-created right to redress discrimination is not."^[25]

The Illinois Supreme Court's deference to the legislature, in holding that Logan only had such a right once the process of adjudicating the claim had actually begun, as it would have after the conference, misunderstood the nature of the Constitution's due process guarantee, said Blackmun.^[25] In a case decided around the same time as the Illinois Supreme Court's decision in the instant case, Vitek v. Jones, the Court had held in favor of a Nebraska prison inmate challenging his involuntary transfer to a mental hospital. Justice Byron White had held there that constitutional due process guarantees are federal and "not diminished by the fact that the State may have specified its own procedures that it may deem adequate for determining the preconditions to adverse official action".^[28] "Indeed", Blackmun added, "any other conclusion would allow the State to destroy at will virtually any state-created property interest."^[25]

Having established that Logan had been deprived of a property interest, Blackmun turned to the question of what process he was due before that happened. "[I]t has become a truism," he observed, "that 'some form of hearing' is required before the owner is finally deprived of a protected property interest." But Court precedent also recognized that the nature of the process would vary based on "the importance of the private interest and the length or finality of the deprivation ... the likelihood of governmental error ... and the magnitude of the governmental interests involved." Taking all these factors into consideration, Logan was entitled to the full process he would have gotten if the hearing date had been timely set:^[29]

Logan's interests in retaining his employment, in disproving his employer's charges of incompetence or inability, and—more intangibly—in redressing an instance of alleged discrimination, are all substantial. At the same time, the deprivation here is final; Logan, unlike a claimant whose charge is dismissed on the merits for lack of evidence, cannot obtain judicial review of the Commission action. A system or procedure that deprives persons of their claims in a random manner ... presents an unjustifiably high risk that meritorious claims will be terminated. And the State's interest in refusing Logan's procedural request is, on this record, insubstantial

Lastly, Blackmun addressed Zimmerman's arguments that the case not be distinguished from Parratt, that Logan still had post-deprivation remedies in state court. "This argument misses Parratt's point", Blackmun responded. That case had involved an unforeseeable accident, whereas Logan had been deprived of his property interest through the prescribed operation of state law. "Parratt was not designed to reach such a situation." He further pointed out that a tort against the state in its Court of Claims would be likelier to be more expensive and protracted for Logan than his FEPC case had been, and as Canel had conceded during oral argument, could not result in him getting his job back, something only the FEPC could order.^[30]

In conclusion, Blackmun reiterated that the Court's decision did not entitle every aggrieved litigant to their day in court or its equivalent. "The State may erect reasonable procedural requirements for triggering the right to an adjudication, be they statutes of limitations ... or, in an appropriate case, filing fees."^[30] But, quoting previous cases, he said that the Fourteenth Amendment required "'an opportunity . . . granted at a meaningful time and in a meaningful manner' ... 'for [a] hearing appropriate to the nature of the case'".^[31][32] That, Logan had been denied.^[30]

Blackmun concurrence

Blackmun took the unusual step^[1] of writing a concurring opinion to his own opinion for the Court. He was joined by three other justices: William Brennan, Marshall, and Sandra Day O'Connor (whom a headnote indicated joined only that concurrence and not Blackmun's majority opinion). "Although the Court considered that it was unnecessary to discuss and dispose of the equal protection claim when the due process issue was being decided in Logan's favor, I regard the equal protection issue as sufficiently important to require comment on my part," he wrote, "particularly inasmuch as a majority of the Members of the Court are favorably inclined toward the claim, although, to be sure, that majority is not the one that constitutes the Court for the controlling opinion."^[33][e]

The equal protection claim in the case was "unconventional", Blackmun conceded, since the state did not explicitly create any classifications among litigants in the FEPA. That changed with the Illinois Supreme Court's strict reading. According to Blackmun, by refusing to allow FEPC the flexibility to correct or ignore its own mistake, claimants for before it were now divided between those whose complaints the commission processed in a timely fashion and those who it failed to do so for, no matter how timely those complaints were otherwise.^[38]

Since there was thus a classification, the next step was to decide whether it was rational. After briefly reviewing precedent in the area that held that test was "not toothless"^[39] despite its requirements very often being met when considered by courts, Blackmun said that in this case there was no room for doubt: "I see no need to explore the outer bounds of this test, for I find that the Illinois statute runs afoul of the lowest level of permissible equal protection scrutiny."^[40]

Taking under consideration the FEPA's two stated purposes—eliminating employment discrimination while providing employers with a process that protected them from baseless claims—Blackmun wrote that "[i]t is evident at a glance that neither of these objectives is served by [FEPA]'s deadline provision. Terminating potentially meritorious claims in a random manner obviously cannot serve to redress instances of discrimination. And it cannot protect employers from unfounded charges, for the frivolousness of a claim is entirely unrelated to the length of time the Commission takes to process that claim."^[40]

Blackmun likened FEPA as interpreted by the Illinois Supreme Court to an Oregon statute the Court had struck down on equal protection grounds in Lindsey v. Normet a decade prior. The state had required that tenants challenging their evictions were required to put up a bond equal to twice their monthly rent in advance of beginning proceedings. The Court had rejected all challenges to that law save the equal protection grounds, for the merits of a tenant's case against their landlord had no relation to their ability to afford the potentially exorbitant bond.^[41] "While it may well be true that '[n]o bright line divides the merely foolish from the arbitrary law,'" Blackmun wrote, quoting from Schweiker v. Wilson, another equal-protection case the Court had decided the year before,^[42] "I have no doubt that [this law] is patently irrational in the light of its stated purposes."^[40]

The Illinois Supreme Court had also, Blackmun agreed, found two other public purposes for the 120-day deadline—that it expedited dispute resolution, and keeping the commission's case load manageable. He dismissed the first: "Insofar as the court meant to suggest that a factfinding conference may help settle controversies and frame issues for a more efficient future resolution, it was undoubtedly correct. But I cannot agree that terminating a claim that the State itself has misscheduled is a rational way of expediting the resolution of disputes." Blackmun also found this rationale dubious since once the conference had been held, the law set no deadline for the resolution of the dispute.^[40]

Blackmun conceded that claims where the deadline had been missed, such as Logan's, were indeed resolved expeditiously. But that was less analysis than the Fourteenth Amendment required, he wrote.^[40]

So far as the State's purpose is concerned, every FEPA claimant's charge, when filed with the Commission, stands on the same footing. Yet certain randomly selected claims, because processed too slowly by the State, are irrevocably terminated without review. In other words, the State converts similarly situated claims into dissimilarly situated ones, and then uses this distinction as the basis for its classification. This, I believe, is the very essence of arbitrary state action.

So, too, was the state's possible interest in administrative efficiency. If that was indeed the goal, Blackmun wrote, "[it] suffers from the defect outlined above: it draws an arbitrary line between otherwise identical claims." It was also "speculative and attenuated" in relation to that goal as to arbitrary on its face. "The State's rationale must be something more than the exercise of a strained imagination; while the connection between means and ends need not be precise, it, at the least, must have some objective basis", he concluded. "That is not so here."^[40]

Powell concurrence

Justice Powell, joined by William Rehnquist, characterized the case as being of "little importance except to the litigants" since the statute had long since been amended, arising from "an isolated example of bureaucratic oversight". He expressed surprise that the more likely solution, tolling the deadline until the hearing could be held, was rejected in favor of a strict reading of the statute.^[22]

"The issue presented, at least for me, is too simple and straightforward to justify broad pronouncements on the law of procedural due process or of equal protection", Powell wrote. Rejecting the expansive reading he believed was suggested by Blackmun's opinions, "should be decided narrowly on its unusual facts".^[f] Those facts supported Blackmun's reasoning that the state denied Logan equal protection of the laws by creating two arbitrarily different classes of claimants:^[22]

As claimants possessed no power to convene hearings, it is unfair and irrational to punish them for the Commission's failure to do so. The State also has asserted goals of redressing valid claims of discrimination and of protecting employers from frivolous lawsuits. Yet the challenged classification, which bore no relationship to the merits of the underlying charges, is arbitrary and irrational when measured against either purpose.^[g]

Powell agreed that Lindsey and Schweiker compelled the result. " Although I do not join Justice Blackmun's separate opinion, I agree that the challenged statute, as construed and applied in this case, failed to comport with this minimal standard", he concluded. "I am concerned by the broad sweep of the Court's opinion, but I do join its judgment."^[22]

Aftermath

While the case was pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled on another challenge to the FEPA's deadlines provision. The 1978 amendment to the law following the Springfield-Sangamon decision had allowed claimants who had filed with the FEPC prior to that amendment's effective date but not had their claims acted on to refile those claims in state court. An employer facing a revived lawsuit argued the amended statute allowing it was a violation of the

Wilson was interpreted as effectively barring the revival of any claim FEPC had administratively closed prior to 1981—until Logan. A federal class action suit brought by 3,000 plaintiffs who met its conditions went back and forth between the district court and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals for the rest of the decade until Judge Brian Barnett Duff held in 1989 that the retroactive application of Logan the plaintiffs sought, while otherwise justifiable, would have led to an inequitable result for employers who, possibly lacking access to the evidence necessary to defend claims that were at that point well over a decade old, would effectively be forced to settle to their own financial detriment.^[47] The plaintiffs appealed that as well, arguing that Chevron Oil Co. v. Huson^[48] allowed an exception, but the Seventh Circuit again held for the state.^[49]

Subsequent jurisprudence

Two years later, in

• Haygood v. Younger: In 1985, the Ninth Circuit affirmed a Section 1983 jury verdict in favor of a former prisoner who alleged California had miscalculated his sentence, resulting in him serving five years more than he should have, could proceed with a Section 1983 action against the state for excessive custody. In such a case, wrote Judge Alfred Goodwin for an en banc court, "[a] court's first task is to determine whether Parratt (random act) or Logan (official practice and procedure) controls." The court agreed that Haygood's extra time was the result of the latter.^[67]
• Bretz v. Kelman: The same year, the Ninth Circuit found Logan applicable when remanding a Section 1983 malicious prosecution suit by a Montana man back to the district court which had dismissed it. "As in Logan, Bretz is challenging the direct abuse of the state process itself. It is meaningless to speak of the state's ability to provide postdeprivation remedial process where the state process itself has been abused",^[h] Goodwin wrote. "Consequently, also as in Logan, the state cannot satisfy the due process clause here by providing Bretz with a postdeprivation remedy in state court in the form of a tort action for malicious prosecution."^[69]
• Burch v. Appalachee Community Mental Health Services: Judge Thomas Alonzo Clark relied on Logan when concurring in this 1988 Eleventh Circuit decision that held a Florida man had been deprived of his rights when, after being involuntarily committed to a local mental hospital, he was held there for five months without a legally required hearing before being discharged. Despite the greater factual similarities to Hudson and Parratt, Clark found Logan the controlling case, as the plaintiff had been taken into custody under established state procedure, and his lengthy commitment had been the result of the state's failure to follow that procedure, just as Logan's complaint had been closed due to the state's mistake.^[70]
• Matthias v. Bingley: In 1990, the Fifth Circuit upheld a jury verdict for several plaintiffs whose seized property was ultimately sold due to a series of paperwork mistakes by members of the Houston Police Department. The defendants had likened the case to Parratt, as an unforeseeable and random action for which no predeprivation remedy could be possible. Judge Irving Loeb Goldberg was not convinced, seeing the case as more like Logan: "In fact, this case involves a systemic problem far more constitutionally problematic than that in Logan. In Logan, had the system worked correctly and no error occurred, the Commission's actions would not violate the Due Process Clause", he wrote. "But here, even if every City employee strictly complies with the City's system for processing seized property ... the system itself still blatantly violates the Due Process Clause."^[71]
• Long v. Morris: In this 1991 case, the Sixth Circuit relied on Logan to deny qualified immunity to Tennessee correctional officers who suspended, or threatened to, inmates' visitation privileges in retaliation for their refusal to comply with a strip search. Since state prison regulations said those privileges could only be abridged for good cause, they were a protected interest and came under the protection of Logan as settled law.^[72]
• Shvartsman v. Apfel: In 1998, the Seventh Circuit rejected this challenge to the
  food stamps were terminated in August 1997, per the act, unless they could prove they had gained U.S. citizenship by that point. They had likened their case to Logan, but Judge Joel Flaum was unpersuaded, distinguishing the cases by noting that Logan had recognized a property right in the claim itself, not the procedures to assert it: "[Their reliance on Logan gets them no closer to their goal of establishing a property interest in the Food Stamp recertification procedures. This result is unsurprising, for defining access to procedures as a protectable property interest would eliminate the distinction between property and the procedures that are constitutionally required to protect it", he wrote. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized the importance of this distinction, and the Court has not looked favorably upon claims of a property entitlement to a set of procedures."^[73][i]
• Youakim v. McDonald: In 2000 the Northern District of Illinois sided with foster parents who challenged a reform in the system that denied them retroactive benefits past a certain date if the state's Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) had not yet acted upon their applications, even if they were later found by DCFS to have been in continual compliance with new licensure requirements up to a certain date. Judge John Albert Nordberg found this provision "analogous to the 120-day deadline in Logan. Neither Plaintiffs here nor the plaintiff in Logan had any ability to expedite the process, their property interest was entirely in the hands of the State and the State is proceeding arbitrarily." And unlike Logan, there was no postdeprivation remedy available.^[75]
• Hettinga v. United States, in 2012, considered a different aspect of Logan: the degree of deference involved in rational basis review. The
  per curiam opinion responded. In the instant case, regardless of the impact on the plaintiffs, the government had satisfactorily explained the basis for the law, which was found to be rationally related to that purpose.^[76]

The year after the rezoning, the Pritchards provisionally sold the lot to a developer who drew up plans for a shopping center at the site, and submitted them to the county planning commission, which gave the project preliminary approval but sought some changes. Near the end of the year that approval was rescinded after an updated plan was not submitted. In May 1986, the day before the original two-year grace period expired, the Pritchards submitted a nearly identical site plan, which the commission again rejected. This time it cited the zoning change.^[78]

The Pritchards sued, but lost at trial in circuit court. The Court of Special Appeals reversed in an unpublished opinion, finding that the two-year grace period established a property interest for the Pritchards which, per Logan, the state could not terminate without due process. The county was granted certiorari by the state Court of Appeals.^[78]

"There is no procedural due process violation", wrote Judge Lawrence Rodowsky for a unanimous court. The Pritchards had not been denied a hearing; they had had one when they submitted their plan right before the deadline and had been given adequate notice two years prior of what they needed to have done in order to retain the rural commercial zoning. Contrary to what the lower court had held, mere submission of a plan did not toll the deadline. "Logan is not on point", Rodowsky said. "Here ... the Pritchards' property was not downzoned as a result of any determination of adjudicative facts by the Commission. The downzoning was legislative action ... delayed for the two-year grace period."^[79]

The Pritchards had also argued a denial of equal protection, based on Blackmun's concurrence in Logan. Again the court was unconvinced.^[80]

Unlike Logan, whether a property owner satisfies the criterion by the time limit is a matter over which the property owner can exercise control, where, as here, there is no question as to the good faith of the administrative review ... Those who submit their site plans for review early in the two-year grace period enjoy a greater likelihood that the process will be completed and any approval granted than do those who delay until late in the process or who, as did the Pritchards, delay until the last moment.

Joshua v. City of Gainesville

The

The city moved for dismissal on the grounds that the case was time-barred, citing recent lower-court precedent to that effect.[82] Joshua could have filed her suit no later than January 1997, it said. She responded that that deadline did not apply because she had never received any determination from the commission, and thus the state's usual four-year statute of limitations for statutory causes of action applied, under which her suit had been timely. The trial court ruled for the city and dismissed, which Joshua appealed. The First District Court of Appeal affirmed, but certified the question to the state Supreme Court.^[81]

Writing for a unanimous court, Justice

Quince held that the rigid application of the deadline in Joshua's case, without any statutory support, denied her due process. She found Logan to be helpful in understanding this. "As in Logan, this case involves administrative inaction and error", Quince wrote. "A claimant should not be penalized for attempting to allow a government agency to do its job." To that end she reminded the commission that it owed every complainant notice within the 180 days.[85]

District of Columbia v. Beretta USA

In 2008 the District of Columbia Court of Appeals relied in part on Logan when dismissing the district's suit against the gunmaker for its role in contributing to gun violence in the district by retroactively applying the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which strictly limits suits against firearms manufacturers, passed during the pendency of the suit. The district argued that the ongoing action was a claim with a property interest, like Logan's, that could not just be arbitrarily extinguished by an act of Congress. "But Logan, in our judgment, imposes no such complete restriction on legislative authority", wrote Judge Michael W. Farrell for a unanimous court.^[86]

Farrell pointed to the language in Logan saying that the state "remains free to create substantive defenses or immunities for use in adjudication—or to eliminate its statutorily created causes of action altogether".^[87] That last was exactly what had happened here, he wrote. The district had been deprived of its claim not by the executive or judicial branches, but by a legislative act, which was per Logan, all the process that was due."^[87][86]

The district had argued that this still said nothing about Congress's powers to retroactively bar causes of action that it had previously permitted while suits under those causes were pending. Farrell looked to other cases, particularly Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, Inc., a 1995 case where the Supreme Court had held unconstitutional an amendment to the Securities Act of 1934 that required federal courts to reopen some closed cases.^[88] While the district's suit was a protected property interest per Logan, Farrell conceded, that alone could not exempt it from the FLCAA.^[86]

Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Retirement Services v. Cesta

In 2019 Ohio's

On appeal, the decision was affirmed. Judge Diane Grendell wrote for a unanimous panel that Logan was inapposite both legally and factually. First, the statute establishing the deadline was self-executing, involving no process, and thus beyond the reach of Logan. Second, Shepherd, unlike Logan, had waited almost until the last moment to request the appointment of a special administrator. "There is no evidence that Shepherd of the Valley sought an expedited ruling or otherwise advised the probate court of the urgency of the appointment", Grendell wrote. "[I]t cannot be said that [it] acted with due diligence to comply with [the statute]'s reasonable procedural requirements. The claim in Logan, by contrast, was compromised by the state's inaction and dilatory conduct."^[89]

Analysis and commentary

Theory of property

The year after Logan was decided, Emory law professor Timothy Terrell added a lengthy critique of Blackmun's reasoning behind holding Logan's complaint a protected property interest, which he characterized as "harmful[ly] superficial", to an essay he had begun writing on what he argued was the Court's vague and intellectually unsound understanding of property. By not elucidating more on Justice Jackson's equally shallow analysis in Mullane, "much important analytic detail is assumed and obscured." While a contractual cause of action had long been recognized as property under the common law concept of a chose in action, it was harder to recognize torts as property due to their lack of transferability.^[90]

Terrell focused on Blackmun's likening of Logan's right to have his complaint heard on the merits to the indigent petitioners' right to divorce in Boddie. "While his conclusion may seem reasonable, his reasoning is strained and unnecessary", Terrell wrote. Divorce did not have to be viewed as property to be a protectable interest. "Instead, it and any other right relating to use of the court system could and should be labeled as 'liberty' interests."^[91]

Terrell connected this to a theory he had been developing that due process rights are strongest where the government provides the only forum for redress. He defended Justice Rehnquist's widely criticized

Three years later Villanova professor Karen Flax considered the issue at more length. She argued that while the Court did not formally reject the "bitter with the sweet" theory until Loudermill, it effectively did so in Logan. There, by joining Blackmun's majority opinion, Burger, who had been part of the plurality in Arnett, formally left Rehnquist by himself in asserting it.^[97]

Thomas W. Merrill, Charles Evans Hughes Professor at Columbia Law School, looked back in 2000 and observed that, perhaps because Loudermill had explicitly rejected Arnett's "bitter with the sweet" formulation, the "analytically coherent solution to the positivist trap" that Logan had offered in conjunction with another minimally cited case from that era, Memphis Light, Power & Gas Division v. Craft^[98][l] had been overlooked.^[101] As a result, four of the Court's recent cases^[m] that had turned in part on the definition of property were still problematic.^[102]

Merrill found one of those four cases,