Felix Frankfurter

“ The scheme for protecting the school system from being made the instrument of purposes other than a school system should serve in a free society certainly a concern within the constitutional powers of a State bristles with ambiguities which must enter into any constitutional decision we may make. ”

“ It thus appears that we are asked to review a complicated statutory scheme prohibiting those who engage in the kind of speech or conduct that is proscribed from holding positions in the public school system. The scheme is aligned with a complex system of enforcement by administrative investigation, reporting and listing of proscribed organizations. All this must further be related to the general procedures under the New York law for hearing and reviewing charges of misconduct against educational employees, modified as those procedures may be by the Feinberg Law and the Regents' Rules. ”

“ No problem of a free society is probably more difficult than the reconciliation or accommodation of these too often conflicting interests. The judicial role in this process of accommodation is necessarily very limited and must be carefully circumscribed. ”

“ They do not assert that they are threatened with action under the law, or that steps are imminent whereby they would incur the hazard of punishment for conduct innocent at the time, or under standards too vague to satisfy due process of law. They merely allege that the statutes and Rules permit such action against some teachers. Since we rightly refused in the Mitchell case to hear government employees whose conduct was much more intimately affected by the law there attacked than are the claims of plaintiffs here, this suit is wanting in the necessary basis for our review. ”

“ The difference cannot be meaningless, it may even be decisive, if our function is to balance the restrictions on freedom of utterance and of association against the evil to be suppressed. Again, the Rules seem to indicate that past activities of the proscribed organizations or past membership in listed organizations may be enough to bar new applicants for employment. ”

“ But its action cannot of course confer jurisdiction on this Court, limited as that is by the settled construction of Article III of the Constitution. We cannot entertain, as we again recognize this very day, a constitutional claim at the instance of one whose interest has no material significance and is undifferentiated from the mass of his fellow citizens. Doremus v. Board of Education, 342 U.S. 429, 72 S.Ct. 394. This is not a 'pocketbook action.' As taxpayers these plaintiffs cannot possibly be affected one way or the other by any disposition of this case, and they make no such claim. ”

“ Two are parents of children in New York City schools. Four are teachers in these schools. On the basis of the record before us these claims, too, are insufficient, in view of our controlling adjudications, to support the jurisdiction of this Court.
The trial court found the interests of the plaintiffs as parents inconsequential. Lederman v. Board of Education, 196 Misc., at page 875, 95 N.Y.S.2d 114. I agree. Parents may dislike to have children educated in a school system where teachers feel restrained by unconstitutional limitations on their freedom. ”

“ These gaps in our understanding of the precise scope of the statutory provisions are deepened by equal uncertainties in the implementing Rules. Indeed, according to the Appellate Division these Rules are not in the case. ”