Opinion
Case No. S22C1102
05-31-2023
FLORIDA ROCK INDUSTRIES, INC. v. CLAYTON COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS et al.
Keith Robert Blackwell, William Clay Massey, Shannon Nicole Vreeland, Alston & Bird LLP, One Atlantic Center, 1201 West Peachtree Street, Suite 4900, Atlanta, Georgia 30309, for Appellant. Amy Bryant Cowan, Dana Kristin Maine, Freeman Mathis & Gary, LLP, 100 Galleria Parkway, Suite 1600, Atlanta, Georgia 30339, for Appellee.
Keith Robert Blackwell, William Clay Massey, Shannon Nicole Vreeland, Alston & Bird LLP, One Atlantic Center, 1201 West Peachtree Street, Suite 4900, Atlanta, Georgia 30309, for Appellant.
Amy Bryant Cowan, Dana Kristin Maine, Freeman Mathis & Gary, LLP, 100 Galleria Parkway, Suite 1600, Atlanta, Georgia 30339, for Appellee.
ORDER OF THE COURT .
The Supreme Court today denied the petition for certiorari in this case.
All the Justices concur.
Peterson, Presiding Justice, concurring. Numerous Georgia statutes governing review of administrative agency decisions allow or require a reviewing court to reverse the agency's decision if it was not supported by "substantial evidence." Over the last forty-or-so years, our Court and the Court of Appeals have come to interpret that phrase to mean essentially "any evidence." This cert petition persuasively suggests that we may have gone astray. Although I think the issue the petition raises may have gravity, the statute presenting it in this case will expire by the time we could decide the case. So I merely flag the issue for future consideration and concur in the denial of certiorari.
See, e.g., OCGA §§ 5-4-12 ; 8-3-215 (b) (5) ; 31-5-3 (a) (2); 33-2-28 (a) (3) & (c) (2) (E); 45-19-39 (b) (5); 45-20-9 (m) (4); 50-13-19 (h) (5).
See, e.g., Dept. of Human Resources v. Montgomery , 248 Ga. 465, 466 (1), 284 S.E.2d 263 (1981) ; DeKalb County v. Bull , 295 Ga. App. 551 (1) & n.2, 672 S.E.2d 500 (2009) ; Macon-Bibb County Planning and Zoning Comm'n v. Epic Midstream , 349 Ga. App. 568, 572 (1), 826 S.E.2d 403 (2019).
In this case, Florida Rock Industries asked us to review whether the Superior Court of Clayton County correctly applied the "substantial evidence" standard of OCGA § 5-4-12 (b) to the County Board of Commissioners's decision to deny two conditional use permits for mining. Florida Rock argues, in essence, that the "substantial evidence" standard "has become confused and unsettled," with "busy appellate courts sometimes reduc[ing] it to a label," such that "it now is too commonly understood to mean literally just any evidence."
Florida Rock strikes me as making a good point; as a matter of plain meaning, it is hard not to notice the difference in terms. "Any evidence" seems to mean what it says, so "substantial evidence" would presumably have to mean something else. After all, we normally presume "that the legislature did not intend to enact meaningless language." Pandora Franchising v. Kingdom Retail Grp. , 299 Ga. 723, 728 (1) (b), 791 S.E.2d 786 (2016) (citation and punctuation omitted).
Indeed, it appears that the phrase "substantial evidence" had an identifiable, stable meaning in the law by the time many of our state's review provisions were enacted. See, e.g., Consol. Edison Co. v. Nat. Labor Relations Bd. , 305 U.S. 197, 229, 59 S.Ct. 206, 83 L.Ed. 126 (1938) ("Substantial evidence ... means such relevant evidence as a reasonable mind might accept as adequate to support a conclusion."); Lathem v. Hartford Accident & Indem. Co. , 60 Ga. App. 523, 524, 527, 3 S.E.2d 916 (1939) (factual findings underlying a workers’ compensation award "must have some substantial evidence for its support" — which the court described as asking "whether or not there was sufficient competent evidence to sustain the award"); "Substantial Evidence," Black's Law Dictionary 658 (4th ed. 1968) ("evidence sufficient in law," and "evidence reasonably tending to support [a] verdict"; "evidence that is competent, relevant, and material, and which to rational and impartial mind naturally leads, or involuntarily tends to lead, to conclusion for which there is valid, just, and substantial reason"). And that meaning, it seems to me, apparently referred to something more than literally any evidence. See Universal Camera Corp. v. Nat. Labor Relations Bd. , 340 U.S. 474, 477, 71 S.Ct. 456, 95 L.Ed. 456 (1951) ("substantial evidence is more than a mere scintilla ... it must do more than create a suspicion of the existence of the fact to be established") (citation and punctuation omitted); Tamiami Trail Tours, Inc. v. Ga. Serv. Comm'n , 213 Ga. 418, 430 (4), 99 S.E.2d 225 (1957) (in case decided under old evidence code, we said that "[m]ere uncorroborated hearsay or rumor does not constitute substantial evidence" (citation and punctuation omitted)); Rogers v. City of Atlanta , 110 Ga. App. 114, 117-18 (2), 137 S.E.2d 668 (1964) ("Regardless of any presumption that may obtain in favor of the validity of administrative zoning actions[,] and regardless of whether or not the zoning authority must render findings, there must be some competent evidence on which the zoning authority can act, else there is an abuse of discretion." (citations omitted)).
My purpose today, however, is simply to flag the issue. This case was decided under OCGA § 5-4-12. That statute has been repealed effective July 1 of this year. See Ga. L. 2022, p. 767, § 1-2. Despite my reservations, and despite the legitimate questions Florida Rock raises in its cert briefing, the gravity this issue might otherwise have is severely lessened by the dwindling vitality of the particular statute at issue in this case.
The statute we would be interpreting would no longer exist by the time we decided the case; and it would not be appropriate, in my view, to take this case as a vehicle to decide the meaning of "substantial evidence" for all the many other statutes using the same words. It is possible those statutes all mean the same thing — we certainly seem to have treated them that way — but it is hardly clear. Depending on when each statute using this phrase was enacted or re-enacted, it may be the legal context underlying the terminology may be different, or even that some of that number have received a consistent and definitive construction. See Elliott v. State , 305 Ga. 179, 184-87 (II) (B), 824 S.E.2d 265 (2019). And even then, if this Court has authoritatively interpreted any of these statutes to mean literally any evidence, stare decisis considerations might come into play for those (but not necessarily all the other) statutes. The analysis, in short, may or may not be one-size-fits-all. Thus, although I write separately to flag the issue for the future, I concur in the Court's denial of certiorari in this case.