Northern Pipeline Co. v. Marathon Pipe Line Co.

The plurality opinion, written by Justice Brennan, decided that the only acceptable uses of Article I, also called legislative, courts were those which had already been approved of by the Court. These fell into three categories. The first was courts in territories of the United States not within the country itself. The second exception was military court martials. The third exception, and the only one which needed to be considered for the case at hand, was public rights cases, or cases in which the government and an individual or private interest were interested parties. The plurality held that while Congress did have an interest in regulating bankruptcy matters, it was not an interested party in proceedings between two private interests, and therefore those proceedings must be heard by an Article III judge. The decision killed the 1978 bankruptcy reform plan, but the Court made its judgment non-retroactive, ruling that to overturn previous decisions rendered by the bankruptcy courts would impose unjust hardship on parties affected by those decisions. Justices Rehnquist and O'Connor concurred in the decision, but felt it was too broad. They felt the constitutionality of the courts themselves was not at issue in the case, only the appropriateness of them hearing the case in question.

Justice White wrote a dissent, joined by Chief Justice Burger and Justice Powell, which said it was not necessary to assume the three examples of legislative courts cited by the plurality were the only ones which could be allowed merely because they were the only ones which had been thus far explicitly approved. Indeed, the dissent claimed that close examination showed that there was no distinction between jurisdiction of Article III and Article I courts, that both varieties heard all types of cases on a regular basis throughout the country. It also claimed that the oversight Article III courts held over the bankruptcy courts made those courts acceptable under Article III. Justice White wrote that Article III need not be taken as an absolute ban on legislative courts for any category of cases, but should be viewed as a principle to be weighed in the acceptability of such courts, along with other pragmatic concerns such as seeing that specialized cases were heard by specialized judges, expediting the legal process, and allowing Congress to maintain some flexibility in its maintenance of the court system.

While the decision was viewed at the time as an attempt to clear up what the dissent admitted "has been characterized as one of the most confusing and controversial areas of constitutional law," it was generally regarded as a failure in that respect. As Maryellen Fullerton, assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, wrote in the Brooklyn Law Review:

Unfortunately, Marathon did little to resolve this confusion. The Supreme Court produced four separate opinions . . . so contradictory that no one can safely predict the Court's ruling on future cases involving Article I federal courts.