“Do you know who I am?”

According to an editorial report in London’s Telegraph earlier this year, an Italian court has ruled that it is not inappropriate for a lawyers’ association to discipline one of its members for uttering in the course of a social interaction that classic phrase of intimidation, “Do you know who I am?” (“We know who you are” (editorial), Daily Telegraph, Jan. 15). If adopted in this country, such a disciplinary rule might tend to crimp the style of famed tort high-roller Stanley Chesley, to judge by an generally puffy recent Cincinnati Enquirer profile (Chuck Martin, “Champion for little guy”, May 28). (These seeming puff pieces so often turn out to embarrass inadvertently.) More on Chesley: Mar. 6, 2006; Aug. 24, 2005; Jan. 11, 2004; Aug. 7-8, 2001; Aug. 16-17, 2000; Jun. 1, 2000; Apr. 12, 2000; Mar. 30, 2000; Dec. 23-26, 1999.

The first refuge of a scoundrel

A Feministe commenter writes about street harassment (h/t Slim):

Last summer, I was walking on the street, holding a large coffee I had just bought. Suddenly, a guy coming from behind me grabbed my ass and asked me ‘where I was walking with that nice ass of mine’. I was lost in my thoughts when it happened, and it surprised me so much that it made me screamed and jumped, which resulted in me throwing *very* hot coffee all over his face and shoulders. It was an accident, but I can’t tell you how much satisfaction I got from hearing him scream in pain as he got burned by the coffee.

The best part? As I was walking away, laughing my ‘nice’ ass off, he screamed at me that he was going to sue me!

Long-time Overlawyered readers will also note the fortunate fact that the commenter’s coffee didn’t have an identifiable brand name that permitted her assailant to sue the restaurant for serving hot coffee.

Update: Western Digital hard drives

Reader Mickey Ferguson writes: “I just wanted to follow up on the original message I sent which you posted Apr. 14. On Jun. 20 I was notified that as a result of the settlement of this class action I am now the proud owner of the right to download free (and nearly worthless) hard disk drive backup and recovery software. Woo-hoo! Meanwhile, the lawyers win again. Details here.” More on the case: Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, “Attention hard drive manufacturers! Most people believe that a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes!”, ZDNet, Jun. 29.

Update: Judy Cates heads ITLA

The Illinois Trial Lawyers Association has installed as its president none other than Swansea, Ill. class action lawyer Judy Cates, known to longtime Overlawyered readers for her venture into columnist-suing (Feb. 29, 2000) following the controversial Publisher’s Clearing House settlement. For one of Cates’s more recent suits, see May 4, 2004. (“She’s our poster-lawyer”, St. Clair Record, Jun. 18).

Update: San Diego poisoning

A judge has cut from $100 million to $10 million the punitive damages portion of an unusual verdict in a lawsuit arising from Kristin Rossum’s alleged murder by poison of her husband, Gregory de Villers. The distinctive feature of the verdict, on which we commented Mar. 27, was that the jury assigned 25 percent responsibility for the murder to Rossum’s employer, San Diego County, which employed her as a toxicologist and was said to be blameworthy for letting her steal drugs which she administered to him. (“Judge Cuts $90 Million in Damages in San Diego Murder Case”, AP/L.A. Times, Jun. 19)(via Childs).

Court Quashes Suit Under ADA Regulation

Can you be sued based on an obscure regulation drafted by bureaucrats that expands the reach of an already broad statute? The First Circuit Court of Appeals thought not in its ruling yesterday in Iverson v. City of Boston. Disagreeing with the Tenth Circuit, it held that lawsuits can’t be brought under Justice Department regulations expanding the reach of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by requiring self-evaluation and transition plans, since having such plans is not always necessary to comply with the ADA’s statutory requirement that the disabled receive reasonable accommodations.

It chided the Tenth Circuit for failing to follow the Supreme Court’s 2001 decision in Alexander v. Sandoval, which held that regulations expanding the reach of Title VI’s statutory ban on intentional racial discrimination to include unintentional discriminatory effects on minority groups were not enforceable through lawsuits, and thus rejected a challenge to Alabama’s English-language requirement for drivers’ licenses, which allegedly had the unintended effect of discriminating against Hispanics.

Like other circuits, the First Circuit also held that court complaints alleging disabilities-discrimination cannot simply make a “conclusory contention” of discrimination, but rather must contain some supporting allegations, such as that the plaintiff is a “qualified” person with a disability. This matters because the longer a meritless lawsuit stays in court, the more it costs. A suit that costs $250,000 to defeat at trial may cost only $75,000 if tossed out earlier on summary judgment after discovery, and may cost only $25,000 if tossed out prior to discovery on a motion to dismiss the complaint.

In its 2002 decision in Swierkiewicz v. Sorema, an age and national-origin discrimination case, the Supreme Court made it much harder to toss out meritless discrimination suits at an early stage, ruling that a typical discrimination case can survive a motion to dismiss and proceed to discovery even if the plaintiff does not allege specific facts supporting his discrimination claim, such as that he was qualified for the job. The plaintiff need only allege that he was denied a job because of his age, national-origin, etc., without giving his underlying reasons for believing he was the victim of discrimination.

However, the ADA is very different from the typical antidiscrimination statute. It is both broader (since it requires not simply that the disabled be treated as well as non-disabled workers, but also that they be given preferential “reasonable accommodations”) and narrower (it expressly protects only “qualified” disabled people, unlike race, sex, and age discrimination statutes, which require that unqualified blacks, women, and elderly people be treated as well as their unqualified white, male, and younger colleagues), containing additional statutory elements that a plaintiff must satisfy.

Since the ADA, unlike other antidiscrimination statutes, requires more than a simple showing of discrimination, the First Circuit was right to require ADA plaintiffs to make more than a simple contention of discrimination in their complaint. As the Supreme Court observed in its Swierkiewicz decision, while a plaintiff’s complaint need not provide unnecessary evidentiary details, it nevertheless must “give the defendant fair notice of what the plaintiff’s claim is and the grounds upon which it rests.”

Ignoring Limits on Harassment Liability

Back in 1999, in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, the Supreme Court laid down a test for when sexual harassment rises to the level of “discrimination” for purposes of Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in schools. Recognizing the fact that students frequently insult and tease one another in ways that would be intolerable in the workplace, the court set the bar higher for plaintiffs suing schools rather than employers. Instead of having to show just that harassment was “severe or pervasive” enough to create a “hostile or offensive environment,” as employees do, students have to show that harassment was severe and pervasive enough to interfere with access to an education.

Oddly, this protection against lawsuits has been overlooked not just by some lower court judges, but also by the very schools that benefit from it. In Jennings v. University of North Carolina, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals is rehearing en banc a recent panel decision which ruled 2-to-1 against a harassment claim based on inappropriate sexual discussions between a male coach and female athletes, which the plaintiff witnessed.

The panel majority argued that the conduct was not “severe or pervasive” enough to create a “hostile environment,” since the discussions were seldom aimed at the plaintiff. (Courts have typically given little weight to such “second-hand harassment”). The dissent argued that the conduct was severe or pervasive enough to create a hostile environment. The University seems not to have disputed that the “severe or pervasive” standard applied, or that the plaintiff could prevail merely by showing the existence of a “hostile environment,” even though other courts have recognized that harassment of students by school employees must be both severe and pervasive enough to interfere with access to an education.

But the standard for harassment claims against schools is more exacting, by design. In the higher education context, there are additional reasons for a more demanding standard. As Justice Kennedy observed in his dissent in the Davis case, the lower courts have repeatedly invalidated college harassment codes on First Amendment grounds. Most of the cases Justice Kennedy cited involved codes that banned speech that creates a hostile environment, much like workplace harassment law.

While a single offensive utterance doesn’t create a hostile work environment all by itself, a complainant can allege a hostile environment based on the offensive utterances of many different speakers, even if none of them individually make many offensive statements or intend to create a hostile environment. That effectively forces many employers to adopt “zero tolerance” policies banning racist or sexist speech.

By contrast, the Fourth Circuit’s own ruling in Iota Xi Chapter of Sigma Chi Fraternity v. George Mason University, 993 F.2d 386 (4th Cir. 1993), prevented a university from prohibiting racist and sexist student speech that allegedly created a “hostile and distracting learning environment.”

Moreover, students routinely have R-rated discussions in college dorm rooms that might give rise to a sexual harassment claim under the PG-rated standards of the workplace. As the Eleventh Circuit observed in Sparks v. Pilot Freight Carriers, 830 F.2d 1554, 1561 n.13 (11th Cir. 1987), “most complaints of sexual harassment are based on actions which, although they may be permissible in some settings, are inappropriate in the workplace.”

By relying on workplace standards, the university may well lose a case it would otherwise win. As a result, colleges in the Fourth Circuit may end up having to police private sexual conversations among students in ways that are difficult to enforce, especially if the full Fourth Circuit rejects the panel’s reasoning and treats comments overheard by a plaintiff, but not aimed at her, as harassment.

Spitzer, Faso, and the New York high court

I’ve got an op-ed today in the New York Post about one of the less obvious issues in the high-profile race for Governor of New York: whoever wins will get to reshape the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, with implications long into the future for the state’s legal well-being. Would a Gov. Spitzer appoint anti-business crusaders to the court? (Walter Olson, “N.Y. Judge Wars: Hidden ’06 Issue”, New York Post, Jun. 30)(cross-posted at Point of Law) (& welcome readers of Prof. Bainbridge, who says kind things).