The Lawletter Vol 45 No 2

John Stone—Senior Attorney, National Legal Research Group

     Juvenile offenders and their parents brought a civil rights action against the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice and the Secretary of the Department, challenging the constitutionality of state-wide policies and practices of isolating juvenile offenders in solitary confinement, and alleging claims for disability discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") and the Rehabilitation Act. Their claims withstood a motion to dismiss. G.H. ex rel. Henry v. Marstiller, No. 4:19CV431‑MW/CAS, 2019 WL 6694738 (N.D. Fla. Dec. 6, 2019).

     The source for the constitutional challenge was the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment in the Eighth Amendment.

The Lawletter Vol 45 No 1

John Stone—Senior Attorney, National Legal Research Group

            A survey conducted in Minneapolis, Minnesota, indicated that barely half of the residential rental listings surveyed were affordable for persons receiving vouchers from the federal government's "Section 8" program, and only about a quarter of those affordable properties were willing to accept such vouchers. The backdrop was a vacancy rate in the city for low-income households of only about 2%.

            Citing this data and its desire to broaden housing opportunities for residents receiving the federal vouchers, the City enacted an ordinance that made it an unlawful discriminatory practice for a landlord to use "any requirement of a public assistance program as a motivating factor" to refuse to sell, rent, or lease real property.

The Lawletter Vol 44 No 4

John Stone—Senior Attorney, National Legal Research Group

            In Delaware, a judicial nominating commission, with members balanced between the two major political parties, provides recommended candidates to the Governor for the appointment of judges to the state courts. When a position becomes open, the commission gives public notice of the position, including the major party membership required for nomination to a particular judgeship. The party membership requirement has its origins in article IV, § 3 of the Delaware Constitution, which effectively excludes all candidates for state judge positions who are not members of either the Republican or the Democratic Party.

            A Delaware resident and member of the Delaware Bar considered applying to become a state judge, but in the end, he did not apply because as an independent politically, his application would have been futile in light of the constitutional provision. Nonetheless, first a United States district court and then a federal appellate court found that he had standing to challenge the limitation on judicial candidates to the two major political parties for the Delaware Supreme Court, the Superior Court, and the Chancery Court on the ground that such exclusion of persons not members of those parties was an unjustified infringement on the plaintiff's First Amendment freedom of association.  Adams v. Governor of Del., No. 18-1045, 2019 WL 1549857 (3d Cir. Apr. 10, 2019).

The Lawletter Vol 44 No 1

John Stone—Senior Attorney, National Legal Research Group

            The Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") prohibits covered employers from discriminating against qualified individuals on the basis of disability in regard to job application procedures, the hiring, advancement, or discharge of employees, employee compensation, job training, and other terms, conditions, and privileges of employment. 42 U.S.C. § 12112(a). This prohibition against discrimination can apply to certain medical examinations and inquiries.

            However, the ADA does not forbid all medical examinations and inquiries. Their permissibility and scope varies depending on the stage of employment. Employers are generally prohibited from making any disability-related inquiries or requiring medical examinations of applicants before offering employment.

The Lawletter Vol 43 No 5

John Stone—Senior Attorney, National Legal Research Group

            The Gun Control Act of 1968 bars firearm possession by certain groups of individuals, including convicted felons and those “adjudicated as a mental defective or who ha[ve] been committed to a mental institution.” 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), (4). In 1996, Congress added a domestic violence misdemeanant restriction.  Id. § 922(g)(9). Recognizing  that  “[e]xisting felon-in-possession  laws . . . were not keeping firearms out of the hands of domestic abusers, because many people who engage in serious spousal or child abuse ultimately are not charged with or convicted of felonies,” Congress extended the federal firearm prohibition to persons convicted of misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence to “close this dangerous loophole.” United States v. Hayes, 555 U.S. 415, 426 (2009) (internal quotation marks, citation, and bracket omitted).

The Lawletter Vol 43 No 1

John Stone, Senior Attorney, National Legal Research Group

            The parents of a child sexually abused by a child they adopted brought an action against the state of Nebraska for negligent failure to warn or disclose, and failure to supervise.  A state employee incorrectly stated to the parents before the adoption that the adopted child had no sexual abuse history. After a bench trial, the trial court entered judgment for the State based on the defense of sovereign immunity. When the parents appealed, the Supreme Court of Nebraska affirmed the lower court ruling.  Jill B. v. State, 297 Neb. 57, 899 N.W.2d 241 (2017). 

            Like statutes in many other states, Nebraska's Tort Claims Act, Neb. Rev. Stat. §§ 81-8,209 et seq., includes a waiver of the state's sovereign immunity from tort liability, but it also retains such immunity for some broad categories of conduct. Statutes authorizing a lawsuit against the State are strictly construed, since they are in derogation of the State's sovereignty. Under the intentional torts exception, sovereign immunity is not waived for claims arising out of assault, battery, false imprisonment, false arrest, malicious prosecution, abuse of process, libel, slander, misrepresentation, deceit, or interference with contract rights. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 81-8,219(4).

The Lawletter Vol 42 No 7

John Stone, Senior Attorney, National Legal Research Group

            According to the "intervening causes doctrine," there can be no proximate cause, as is required for liability in a negligence case, where there has intervened between the act of the defendant and the injury to the plaintiff an independent act or omission of someone other than the defendant, that was not foreseeable by the defendant, was not triggered by the defendant's act, and was sufficient of itself to cause the injury. As a general rule, suicide is deemed an unforeseeable intervening cause of death that absolves the tortfeasor of negligence liability in an action for wrongful death.

            When a mother brought an action against a city and its police officer for wrongful death arising out of her teenage daughter's suicide death, after the officer's disclosure of photographs of the daughter's body following her previous suicide attempt, the claim failed because of the intervening cause doctrine.  City of Richmond Hill v. Maia, No. S16G1337, 2017 WL 2332660 (Ga. May 30, 2017).

The Lawletter Vol 42 No 3

John Stone, Senior Attorney, National Legal Research Group

            Largely in response to mass shootings in places such as Newtown, Connecticut, Aurora, Colorado, Fort Hood, Texas, and Virginia Tech, in 2013, the General Assembly of Maryland enacted the Firearm Safety Act ("FSA"), which bans military-style rifles and shotguns (referred to as "assault weapons") and detachable large-capacity magazines. Affirming in relevant part a decision by the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, Kolbe v. O'Malley, 42 F. Supp. 3d 768 (D. Md. 2014), the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the FSA against a constitutional challenge based on the Second Amendment right to bear arms.  Kolbe v. Hogan, 849 F.3d 114, 2017 WL 679687 (4th Cir. Feb. 21, 2017).

            The appellate court concluded that the assault weapons and large-capacity magazines that were banned by Maryland's FSA were not protected by the Second Amendment; they were most useful in military service, in that they were designed to kill or disable the enemy on a battlefield, and they had a capability for lethality far beyond that of other firearms. This "most useful in military service" concept describes a distinction drawn by the U.S. Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 627 (2008) ("It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause [concerning militias]. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment's ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty.").

The Lawletter Vol 41 No 11

John Stone, Senior Attorney, National Legal Research Group

     As with most forms of employment discrimination, an employer's retaliation against an employee for asserting discrimination under the Equal Pay Act ("EPA") gives rise to an additional and distinct cause of action for the employee. To state a claim for retaliation under the EPA (as incorporated into the Fair Labor Standards Act), a plaintiff must plausibly allege (1) engagement in protected activity, (2) materially adverse action that might well have dissuaded a reasonable worker from making or supporting a charge of discrimination, and (3) causality.

     A showing of the causality element requires either (1) that the retaliation closely followed the protected activity, or (2) that the plaintiff put forth a sufficient explanation for the delay between the protected activity and the alleged retaliation. Where the time between the protected conduct and the alleged retaliation is too great to establish causation based solely on temporal proximity, a plaintiff must present other relevant evidence to establish causation, such as continuing retaliatory conduct and animus in the intervening period. In addition, when there may be valid reasons why an adverse employment action was not taken immediately, the absence of immediacy between the cause and the effect does not disprove causation in a retaliation case.

The Lawletter Vol 41 No 7

John Stone, Senior Attorney, National Legal Research Group

      It is commonly understood that substantive agency regulations that are promulgated pursuant to statutory authority typically have the "force and effect of law." See Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Ass'n, 135 S. Ct. 1199, 1204 (2015). That does not mean, however, that for all purposes and in all contexts, a law is the same as a statute, and vice versa. The point is illustrated by a recent decision by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, where the presence of a one-letter word, "a," was a part of the court's reasoning. Rainey v. Merit Sys. Prot. Bd., No. 2015-3234, 2016 WL 3165617 (Fed. Cir. June 7, 2016).

     A Foreign Affairs Officer in the Department of State was relieved of his duties as a contracting officer representative. The officer filed a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel, alleging that his duties had been taken away because he had refused his supervisor's order to tell a contractor to rehire a terminated subcontractor. He argued that his refusal was based on his view that carrying out the order would have required him to violate a federal regulation, by improperly interfering with personnel decisions of a prime contractor and requiring the prime contractor to operate in conflict with the terms of the contract.