Seventh Circuit Roundup

The eighth episode of Seventh Circuit Roundup examines two cases dealing with important federal procedural statutes.

First, In Re Venequip reviewed the requirements for a party in a dispute obtaining discovery in federal court under 28 USC 1782(a). In Venequip, the Seventh Circuit examined the requirements for obtaining discovery for an international suit and reviewed the role played by forum selection and choice of law clauses in that analysis.

Second, the Court in Sudholt v. Country Mutual Insurance Co. considered whether a class action should be remanded under the internal affairs exception of the Class Action Fairness Act in a case where all parties except one were nondiverse. Sudholt examined the role of the internal affairs exception in these circumstances, particularly where the sole diverse defendant was a fiduciary. 

In the seventh episode of Seventh Circuit Roundup, Kian and Mark address cases from very different areas of the law that offer some practical insights for those practicing in the Seventh Circuit.

First, Kian discusses Finch v. Treto, which concerns the circumstances when a district court might decline to issue an injunction even in the face of a potential constitutional violation. Finch concerned a Commerce Clause challenge to Illinois’ licensing system for cannabis dispensaries. The Court declined to require the district court to enjoin all licenses granted to dispensaries. Kian discusses the circumstances that led to that conclusion and how practitioners can avoid falling into situations where injunctive relief might not be available.

Mark addresses U.S v. Diggs, which reviews the various privileges applicable to married couples and examines the joint participation exception to the spousal privilege. Of particular note is Judge Scudder’s dissent suggesting the Seventh Circuit should revisit whether the joint participation exception should continue to apply in light of intervening Supreme Court cases. 

In its sixth episode, Seventh Circuit Roundup covers two August opinions—Bail Project v. Indiana Department of Insurance and St. Augustine School v. Underly. 

The first case is a Free Speech Clause challenge to an Indiana law that requires charitable bail organizations to register with the State and limits for whom such organizations can pay cash bail. A divided 2-1 panel of the Seventh Circuit upheld the law, concluding that “paying cash bail does not inherently express any message,” since “a reasonable observer would not understand” the “payment of cash bail at the clerk’s office as an expression of any message about the bail system.” 

The second case is the latest in a long-running saga (including multiple Seventh Circuit decisions, as well as decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court and the Wisconsin Supreme Court) involving a suit brought by parents against state officials who denied the parents school transportation benefits. Although the parents focused their challenge on federal constitutional grounds, the Seventh Circuit ultimately sided with the parents on state law grounds. The court held that the parents could not force the Seventh Circuit to answer the federal constitutional question by forfeiting their state law arguments, explaining that plaintiffs “have no right to demand that the court’s decision be based on one theory versus another.”

The fifth episode of Seventh Circuit Roundup covers two July opinions—Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections and Hess v. Garcia.

In Bost, the Democratic Party of Illinois tried to intervene to defend the validity of an Illinois election law, which the Illinois State Board of Elections was already defending. The Seventh Circuit denied intervention: It held that the Party could not show that the Board’s representation “may be” inadequate—though it noted that the Party might later be able to make this showing if the Board were to fail to appeal an adverse decision or fail to make an argument that would serve the Party’s interests.

In Hess v. Garcia, meanwhile, the Seventh Circuit reinstated constitutional claims—under the Equal Protection Clause, Fourth Amendment, and Fourteenth Amendment—brought by a female high school student against a local police officer who allegedly repeatedly sexually assaulted her during a school-mandated “ride along.” The Court held that regardless of the legal theory, “sexual assault by an official acting under color of law violates the constitutional rights of the victim.” 

Mark and Kian dive into these opinions and explain why they raise important points about civil procedure, party presentation, and constitutional rights.

In the fourth episode of Seventh Circuit Roundup our team covers the religious-discrimination case, Emad v. Dodge County, and the third-party-discovery case, St. Vincent Medical Group v. U.S. Department of Justice. In Dodge County, a Muslim inmate alleged that Wisconsin prison officials violated the Free Exercise Clause and Equal Protection Clause by allowing Christian inmates to engage in certain forms of prayer while prohibiting him (and other Muslims) from doing the same. The Seventh Circuit had “no trouble concluding [the inmate’s] claims fall in the heartland of these constitutional protections” and reversed the grant of qualified immunity. And in St. Vincent, the Seventh Circuit held that under the Department of Justice’s “Touhy” regulations, federal law enforcement agencies have wide discretion to decline to give testimony in state court litigation. Our team explains why these decisions are interesting, important, and worth considering.

The third episode of Seventh Circuit Roundup covers two significant decisions the Seventh Circuit issued in May — Courtney v. Butler and Bakov v. Consolidated World Travel.

In the first case, the Seventh Circuit applied the Supreme Court’s 1994 decision in Heck v. Humphrey — which held that a plaintiff ordinarily cannot bring a Section 1983 constitutional-rights claim if a judgment in his favor “would necessarily imply the invalidity of his conviction or sentence” — to parole-revocation decisions (it concluded Heck did not bar the plaintiff’s claim that prison officials unconstitutionally failed to effect his release).

The second case, a class action, raised the question of who should bear the cost of notifying the potential class members: The Seventh Circuit held that while generally the plaintiff must initially bear these costs, a district court may shift these costs to the defendant if the class was certified after the defendant was found liable. Listen to learn more about the background, reasoning, and consequences of these decisions.

The second episode of Seventh Circuit Roundup covers three important Seventh Circuit decisions issued in April – Kluge v. Brownsburg Community School Corp., Pucillo v. National Credit Systems, and Indiana Right to Life v. Morales. In the first case, a split 2-1 panel rejected a public schoolteacher’s Title VII religious-accommodation claim, which arose after the teacher objected to his school’s policy requiring teachers to refer to students, including transgender students, by the names registered in the school’s official student database. The latter two cases, meanwhile, address cutting-edge standing issues: Pucillo concerns whether unsolicited debt-collection letters cause injuries sufficiently “concrete” to create standing, and Indiana Right to Life concerns what a plaintiff must show to establish standing to bring a pre-enforcement constitutional challenge to a state statute. Our team provides an interesting and in-depth discussion of the reasoning and consequences of these significant decisions.

The first episode of Seventh Circuit Roundup covers a couple of interesting cases in the Seventh Circuit – Hadzi-Tanovic v. Johnson and Hughes v. Northwestern. The former, a constitutional-rights case arising out of a state-court child-custody battle, addresses when the Rooker-Feldman doctrine bars plaintiffs from challenging state-court decisions in federal court. The latter, a case remanded to the Seventh Circuit following a 2022 SCOTUS decision, concerns ERISA breach-of-fiduciary-duty claims. Our team explains the reasoning and the significance of both of these important decisions.