Goldberg v. Kelly: The Case, the Clerk, and the Justice

Abstract

Goldberg v. Kelly: The Case, the Clerk, and the Justice Michael Nelson (bio) During his nearly thirty-four years on the Supreme Court, Justice William J. Brennan wrote 461 majority opinions, including those in landmark cases such as Baker v. Carr, New York Times v. Sullivan, Cooper v. Aaron, Frontiero v. Richardson, and Texas v. Johnson.1 Yet Brennan described his opinion for the Court in Goldberg v. Kelly as “probably the most important thing that came out of these chambers from me.”2 Brennan was not alone in that assessment. According to Stephen Breyer, who is perhaps as deeply versed in the subject as any justice in the history of the Court, “Goldberg v. Kelly revolutionized administrative law.”3 Yale Law School Professor Jeffrey Mashaw described it as the opening salvo in a “due process revolution.”4 Henry Friendly, the chief judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, suggested that the case caused “a greater expansion of procedural due process. . . than in the entire period since the ratification of the Constitution.”5 Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin wrote, “Goldberg v. Kelly is one of those cases that is so big, its influence so persuasive, its implications so immense, that it is difficult to get a firm grip on it.” Toobin recalled “that I was assigned to read the case in no fewer than five different classes in law school: Constitutional Law (what due process means and who is entitled to it and for what?); Property (do welfare benefits count as property?); Civil Procedure (how much process is ‘due’ process?); Administrative Law (how much process is ‘due’ process—specifically?); and Law of the Welfare State (that course was basically about Goldberg v. Kelly).”6 The Case The Goldberg in Goldberg v. Kelly was Jack Goldberg, New York City’s Commissioner of Welfare. He was appealing a lower court ruling in favor of John Kelly and nineteen other welfare recipients. Their benefits were terminated by their caseworkers for various reasons, and their only recourse was to file a written appeal to their caseworker’s supervisor. Even if they made such an appeal, [End Page 162] their benefits would remain cut off unless and until they prevailed. Welfare owed its existence to a patch-work of state and federal laws, the most important of which was the Social Security Act of 1935. In addition to its most prominent feature—old-age insurance—the act provided modest financial support for other categories of people, including dependent children. Commonly referred to as welfare, this support came in the form of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a program jointly funded by the state and federal governments to provide financial support for single-parent households headed by unmarried, divorced, or widowed women. Widows featured prominently among early beneficiaries, but over time the typical AFDC recipient was more likely to be a politically less sympathetic unwed mother. Most states responded to this change by authorizing local program administrators to deny or cut off benefits to families in which, for example, a man was living in the home. But New York, an unusually generous state, provided additional payments to eligible recipients through its Home Relief program to help cover additional housing, clothing, and certain other needs. The origin of Goldberg v. Kelly lay mostly with lawyers at New York City’s Mobilization for Youth (MFY) Legal Unit and Columbia University’s Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law (CSWPL). For years, such legal representation as AFDC beneficiaries were able to obtain when their benefits were terminated or reduced usually had come from Legal Aid Society lawyers, whose limited number, narrow mission, and slender resources restricted them to helping individuals navigate existing laws and regulations rather than challenging the laws and regulations themselves. According to legal scholar Martha F. Davis, “Despite eighty-nine years of representing the poor, Legal Aid lawyers had never appealed a case to the Supreme Court.”7 In 1964, however, MFY expanded its focus on “organizing the unaffiliated—the lower fifth of the economic ladder” by creating a unit to mount legal challenges to “social policy and administrative practices rather than to supply legal help to clients.”8 One year later, Columbia’s...