Cite as: 503 U. S. 1 (1992)
Blackmun, J., concurring in judgment
This audacious approach to the Eighth Amendment assumes that the interpretation of an explicit constitutional protection is to be guided by pure policy preferences for the paring down of prisoner petitions. Perhaps judicial overload is an appropriate concern in determining whether statutory standing to sue should be conferred upon certain plaintiffs. See, e. g., Associated General Contractors of Cal., Inc. v. Carpenters, 459 U. S. 519, 529-546 (1983) (identifying "judge-made rules" circumscribing persons entitled to sue under § 4 of the Clayton Act); Blue Chip Stamps v. Manor Drug Stores, 421 U. S. 723, 737-749 (1975) (identifying judicial "policy" considerations limiting standing under § 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934). But this inherently self-interested concern has no appropriate role in interpreting the contours of a substantive constitutional right.
Since the burden on the courts is presumably worth bearing when a prisoner's suit has merit, the States' "concern" is more aptly termed a "conclusion" that such suits are simply without merit. One's experience on the federal bench teaches the contrary. Moreover, were particular classes of cases to be nominated for exclusion from the federal courthouse, we might look first to cases in which federal law is not sensitively at issue rather than to those in which fundamental constitutional rights are at stake. The right to file for legal redress in the courts is as valuable to a prisoner as to any other citizen. Indeed, for the prisoner it is more valuable. Inasmuch as one convicted of a serious crime and imprisoned usually is divested of the franchise, the right to file a court action stands, in the words of Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356, 370 (1886), as his most "fundamental political right, because preservative of all rights."
Today's ruling, in any event, does not open the floodgates for filings by prison inmates. By statute, prisoners—alone among all other § 1983 claimants—are required to exhaust administrative remedies. See 94 Stat. 352, 42 U. S. C. § 1997e(a); Patsy v. Board of Regents of Florida, 457 U. S.
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