Harrisburg School District v. Harrisburg Education Ass'n

379 A.2d 893, 32 Pa. Commw. 348, 1977 Pa. Commw. LEXIS 1108
CourtCommonwealth Court of Pennsylvania
DecidedNovember 10, 1977
DocketAppeal, No. 1877 C.D. 1976
StatusPublished
Cited by16 cases

This text of 379 A.2d 893 (Harrisburg School District v. Harrisburg Education Ass'n) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Harrisburg School District v. Harrisburg Education Ass'n, 379 A.2d 893, 32 Pa. Commw. 348, 1977 Pa. Commw. LEXIS 1108 (Pa. Ct. App. 1977).

Opinion

Opinion by

Judge Rogers,

The Harrisburg Education Association and the Pennsylvania State Education Association,1 labor unions, have appealed an order of the Dauphin County Court of Common Pleas entered in a suit by the Harrisburg School District enjoining striking teachers, members of the unions, from picketing the residences of members of the School Board. No school board member has been a party to this lawsuit.

During a teachers strike while collective bargaining negotiations were being conducted, teachers picketed the homes of the District’s nine school board members. On October 22, 1976, the District sued in equity seeking, preliminary and permanent relief of injunction of the residential picketing. The same day the court below granted an ex parte preliminary injunction. On October 27, 1976, the defendants requested a final hearing; and in addition filed preliminary objections asserting that the District lacked standing to assert the school board members’ constitutional rights to privacy in their homes, that the lower court lacked jurisdiction to hear and decide issues presented by the District because the Pennsylvania Employe Delations Act2 provides an adequate statutory remedy, and that the District’s complaint failed to state a cause of action. The court conducted an evidentiary hearing on October 28, 1976, after which it dismissed the defendants’ preliminary objections and issued a decree permanently enjoining the picketing of the residences of school board members. We will reverse this order.

Since we conclude that the Harrisburg School Dis[351]*351trict lacks standing to bring this suit and that the court below erred in not so ruling, we do not reach the interesting question of whether the picketing of the residences of public officers by public employes is, in Pennsylvania, to be held to be a protected right of speech or unlawful invasion of privacy.

The District, the only plaintiff, says that the picketing constituted a violation of its school members’ constitutional rights to privacy and that its, the District’s, relationship with the board members is so close that it has standing to assert their rights on their behalf. We disagree.

In the recent case of Singleton v. Wulff, 428 U.S. 106, 113-16 (1976), the Supreme Court of the United States thoroughly analyzed the question of a litigant’s standing to assert third party constitutional rights:

Federal courts must hesitate before resolving a controversy, even one within their constitutional power to resolve, on the basis of the rights of third persons not parties to the litigation. The reasons are two. First, the courts should not adjudicate such rights unnecessarily, and it may be that in fact the holders of those rights either do not wish to assert them, or will be able to enjoy them regardless of whether the in-court litigant is succesesful or not. See Ashwander v. TVA, 297 U.S. 288, 345-348, 56 S.Ct. 466, 482-83, 80 L.Ed. 688 (1936) (Brandéis, J., concurring, and offering the standing requirement as one means by which courts avoid unnecessary constitutional adjudications). Second, third parties themselves usually will be the best proponents of their own rights. The courts depend on effective advocacy, and therefore should prefer to construe legal lights only when the most effective advocates of those rights are before them. The holders of the [352]*352rights may have a like preference, to the extent they will be bound by the courts’ decisions under the doctrine of stare decisis. See, e.g., Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 204, 82 S.Ct. 691, 703, 7 L.Ed. 2d 663 (1962) (standing requirement aimed at ‘assur [ing] that concrete adverseness which sharpens the presentation of [the] issues upon which the court so largely depends’); Holden v. Hardy, 169 U.S. 366, 397, 18 S.Ct. 383, 390, 42 L.Ed. 780 (1898) (assertion of third parties’ rights would come with ‘greater cogency’ from the third parties themselves). These two considerations underlie the Court’s general rule: ‘Ordinarily, one may not claim standing in this Court to vindicate the constitutional rights of some third party.’ Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U.S. at 255, 73 S.Ct. at 1034. See also Flast v. Cohen, 392 U.S. at 99 n. 20, 88 S.Ct. at 1952; McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420, 429, 81 S.Ct. 1101, 1106, 6 L.Ed. 2d 393 (1961).
Like any general rule, however, this one should not be applied where its underlying justifications are absent. With this in mind the Court has looked primarily to two factual elements to determine whether the rule should apply in a particular case. The first is the relationship of the litigant to the person whose right he seeks to assert. If the enjoyment of the right is inextricably bound up with the activity the litigant wishes to pursue, the court at least can be sure that its construction of the right is not unnecessary in the sense that the right’s enjoyment will be unaffected by the outcome of the suit: Furthermore, the relationship between the litigant and the third party may be such that the former is fully, or very nearly, [353]*353as effective a proponent of the right as the latter. Thus in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed. 2d 510 (1965), where two persons had been convicted of giving advice on contraception, the Court permitted the defendants, one of whom was a licensed physician, to assert the privacy rights of the married persons whom they advised. The Court pointed to the ‘confidential’ nature of the relationship between the defendants and the married persons, and reasoned that the rights of the latter were ‘likely to be diluted or adversely affected’ if they could not be asserted in such a case. Id., at 481, 85 S.Ct. at 1680. See also Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 445-446, 92 S.Ct. 1029, 1034, 31 L.Ed. 2d 349 (1972) (stressing ‘advocate’ relationship and ‘impact of the litigation on the third party interests’); Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U.S., at 259, 73 S.Ct. at 1036 (owner of real estate subject to racial covenant granted standing to challenge such covenant in part because she was ‘the one in whose charge and keeping repose [d] the power to continue to use her property to discriminate or to discontinue such use’). A doctor-patient relationship similar to that in Griswold existed in Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179, 93 S.Ct. 739, 35 L.Ed. 2d 201 (1973), where the Court also permitted physicians to assert the rights of their patients. Id., at 188-189, 93 S.Ct., at 745-46. . . .
The other factual element to which the Court has loohed is the ability of the third party to assert his own right. Even where the relationship is close, the reasons for requiring persons to assert their own rights will generally still apply. If there is some genuine obstacle to [354]

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379 A.2d 893, 32 Pa. Commw. 348, 1977 Pa. Commw. LEXIS 1108, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/harrisburg-school-district-v-harrisburg-education-assn-pacommwct-1977.