Idaho districts sue Idaho’s supreme court justices
A group of school districts has taken the unprecedented step of suing Idaho’s supreme court justices in federal court for ruling in favor of the districts in a school funding lawsuit but not providing any fix. The justices ruled in December 2005 that Idaho’s system for funding school construction is unconstitutional because it leaves poor school districts unable to provide safe schoolhouses for children to attend. Idaho relies almost entirely on property taxes to fund school construction. Local voters must vote by a two-thirds supermajority to raise their own taxes to build a school. The justices, in their ruling, called on the legislature to change the system and even gave examples of ways to fix the problem, including lowering the two-thirds supermajority, funding school buildings from the state’s general fund budget, and tapping corporate income tax revenue. Last spring, both sides in the case submitted conflicting arguments to the court about the action the Legislature took that year on school construction funding. While the state argued that lawmakers had fixed the problem, the districts argued that they’d made it worse. But the justices declined to consider the arguments at all, and instead informed both sides that the case was over. The federal lawsuit seeks an order compelling the Idaho justices to provide for a remedy phase for the trial, or a declaratory judgment that the plaintiffs are entitled to a remedy phase and an award of costs. The winning party’s court costs are required to be paid by the losing party, but the Idaho Supreme Court didn’t order any costs paid when it closed the case. The lawsuit cites Marbury v. Madison, an 1803 U.S. Supreme Court case that says the United States will cease to be a government of laws "if the laws furnish no remedy for the violation of a vested legal right." Glenn Smith, a U.S. constitutional law scholar at California Western School of Law in San Diego, says, "It’s strange, I’ll admit it’s strange. It would have obviously been cleaner for the original Supreme Court ruling to say, ‘We can’t decide this issue because we don’t have an effective remedy at the end of the day.’" But Mr. Smith says he doubts that such a lawsuit could prevail in the federal courts. "Federal courts generally, especially this Supreme Court, don’t like to be countermanding and second-guessing what state courts do under their own constitutions about separation of powers," he says. "Unfortunately, far too often the law recognizes rights for which it can’t afford a good remedy."
Spokane (WA) Spokesman Review
By Betsy Z. Russell
[Full story]
[Editor’s Note: Background on concerns over school financing in Idaho, including fears that the state’s assuming more responsibility for funding inevitably will lead to a loss of local community engagement in schools, is at the first link. See also the information page on Idaho school finance provided by the ACCESS project of Teacher’s College, Columbia. Idaho’s is not the only state supreme court to relegate its own pronouncements to the status of advisory opinions. The Ohio supreme court did the same in its last ruling in the long-running DeRolph case, State ex rel. State v. Lewis, 789 N.E.2d 195 (2003). The curious result was that while the court never reversed its decision that Ohio’s school funding system is unconstitutional, the plaintiffs were left with no remedy. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the decision. See the amicus brief by NSBA and others urging the Court to do so.]
[NSBA School Law pages on Idaho financing concerns]
[ACCESS on Idaho school finance]
[NSBA et al. brief in DeRolph v. Ohio]