Phillips v. Baxter

GARFIELD PHILLIPS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. PHYLLIS BAXTER, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 18-1381

United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Submitted March 20, 2019^*

April 23, 2019

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION

To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1

Before DIANE P. WOOD, Chief Judge FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge AMY C. BARRETT, Circuit Judge

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

No. 16 C 8233

Charles P. Kocoras, Judge.

ORDER

Garfield Phillips, a former employee of the Illinois Department of Human Services, quit his job because, he says, his supervisors harassed him and discriminated against him. He sued the Department and four of his former supervisors, alleging national-origin and ethnicity discrimination, retaliation, conspiracy, and intentionalinfliction of emotional distress. The district court granted a motion to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim and then denied leave to file a proposed amended complaint for the same reason. Because Phillips stated a claim for discrimination, we partially vacate the dismissal and remand for further proceedings.

This case was resolved on the pleadings, so we accept the allegations in Phillips's complaint and proposed amended complaint as true. Phillips, who describes himself as a man of African ancestry and Antigua African ethnicity, worked as a case manager for the Department for 31 years. In 2013, he filed an EEOC discrimination charge against his supervisor, Gayle Stricklin, and a Title VII lawsuit against Stricklin and another supervisor, Phyllis Baxter. (The events leading to the EEOC charge and Title VII suit are not the subject of this suit.) After that, they retaliated and continued to discriminate against him.

Phillips criticized Baxter's management and reported her to his union for falsifying timesheets. Baxter in turn accused him of "unauthorized use of time status," but she withdrew the charge because his absences were approved. Baxter also tried to access Phillips's personal medical records; he filed a grievance with his union. Baxter began curtailing Phillips's work, but not that of other case managers. Phillips could make only local calls; he had to do "common casework" outside of his usual managerial duties; he could not file reports; and he could not instruct, train, or assign work to staff. His "security profile" was reduced, and he was not invited to meetings and training sessions.

Phillips interviewed for two promotions ("Public Service Administration" and "Region 2 SNAP Accuracy-Liaison") while under Baxter's supervision. Though Phillips had a longer tenure at the Department and was more qualified, Stricklin awarded one of the positions to supervisor Rose Norris. Baxter received the other position, even though she never applied for it.

Baxter, Strickland, Norris, and another supervisor (William Willis) tried to transfer Phillips to another office, but he refused. Baxter threatened to fire Phillips for insubordination if he did not accept the transfer. One day she demanded that Phillips report to his new location, but he would not. An hour later, Stricklin told him that he had been transferred, and Baxter screamed at him to leave before she called the cops or "something bad" happened to him. Fearing for his safety, Phillips left the office. That afternoon, his union told him that he was barred from his former worksite and that he was transferred because his experience was needed at the other office.

Phillips "voluntarily terminated" his employment in March 2016 because he feared "false" discipline and physical harm. The Department prohibited Phillips from entering three nearby offices where his friends worked and declined to consider him for work customarily available to former employees.

Phillips sued Baxter, Stricklin, Norris, Willis, and the Department. He claimed that (1) Baxter, Stricklin, Norris, and Willis conspired to discriminate against him because of his Antigua African ethnicity, see 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3); (2) Baxter and Stricklin retaliated against him because of the 2013 EEOC charge and Title VII lawsuit, see 42 U.S.C. § 1981(a); (3) Stricklin, Baxter, and the Department intentionally inflicted emotional distress on him; and (4) Stricklin and the Department violated his employment contract by transferring him without his consent.

The defendants moved to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim. In response, Phillips moved for leave to amend.¹ The court denied him leave because the defendants already had challenged his initial complaint. The court later granted the defendants' motion to dismiss and entered judgment on the same day. It ruled that Phillips had alleged only a legal conclusion that the defendants were "motivated by discriminatory based ethnocentrism," and so he failed to state a claim for a conspiracy to discriminate. Alternatively, the intra-corporate conspiracy doctrine barred the claim because a conspiracy cannot exist between members of the same entity except in "egregious circumstances." Phillips's claim of retaliation failed, the court said, because § 1981 does not provide a right of action against state actors. Next, the court found the alleged misconduct insufficiently "extreme and outrageous" to state a claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Phillips again moved for leave to amend his complaint; in the proposed first amended complaint, he offered the same general narrative but identified new legal theories of relief. This time, he asserted that that Baxter and Stricklin discriminated against him in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, see 42 U.S.C. § 1983, and that the Department failed to properly train and supervise its employees, see id.; he also invoked Monell v. Dep't of Soc. Servs. of City of N.Y., 436 U.S. 658 (1978). Finally, he claimed that Baxter and Stricklin committed intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligence.

The district court orally granted Phillips leave to file the amended complaint and explained that the defendants could challenge the new complaint. The docket entry for the hearing, however, notes that Phillips's motion was "entered," not "granted." The defendants then opposed the motion for leave to amend in writing, arguing that any amendment would be futile because the proposed amended complaint did not state a claim. The district court agreed with the defendants and denied Phillips's motion for leave.

Before turning to the merits, we must first assure ourselves of our jurisdiction. Blue v. IBEW, Local Union 159, 676 F.3d 579, 582 (7th Cir. 2012). A post-judgment motion under Rule 59(a) or Rule 60 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, filed within 28 days of judgment, tolls the 30-day period in which a party must file a notice of appeal to preserve appellate jurisdiction. 28 U.S.C. § 2107(a); FED. R. APP. P. 4(a)(1), (4)(A)(v), (vi); Blue, 676 F.3d at 582. Here, the district court entered judgment on May 24, 2017. Twenty-six days later, Phillips moved to "refile" his amended complaint. Liberally construing his pro se filing, Erickson v. Pardus, 551 U.S. 89, 94 (2007), we treat Phillips's motion as one under Rule 59(e) or Rule 60. See Runnion ex rel. Runnion v. Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago & Northwest Ind., 786 F.3d 510, 521 (7th Cir. 2015) (citing Foman v. Davis, 371 U.S. 178, 182 (1962)); Chaudhry v. Nucor Steel-Ind., 546 F.3d 832, 839 (7th Cir. 2008) (not treating motion to amend complaint as post-judgment motion is "hyper-technical"). The court denied that motion on January 19, 2018, and Phillips filed a notice of appeal on February 20. Thus, his appeal is timely (the last day of the 30-day period was a Sunday, and the next day was a Federal holiday), see FED. R. APP. P. 26(a)(1)(C).

On appeal, Phillips first argues that the dismissal of his original claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) was erroneous because the intra-corporate conspiracy doctrine is an affirmative defense that he was not required to plead around. Generally, affirmative defenses do not justify a dismissal for failure to state a claim, but a plaintiff may "plead [himself] out of court" by alleging the essential elements of such a defense. John K. Maciver Inst. For Pub. Policy v. Schmitz, 885 F.3d 1004, 1014 (7th Cir. 2018). But we need not consider whether Phillips pleaded a conspiracy claim under § 1985(3) because it would be superfluous to his claims under § 1983. Section 1985(3) serves to permit recovery from a private actor who has conspired with state actors. Fairley v. Andrews, 578 F.3d 518, 526 (7th Cir. 2009). "All the defendants are state actors, so a § 1985(3) claim does not add anything except needless complexity." Id.

Phillips next argues that the district court abused its discretion by reneging on its oral decision to grant Phillips leave to amend his complaint. But a district court has discretion to reconsider its interlocutory rulings, subject to the law-of-the-case doctrine. See FED. R. CIV. P. 54(b); Galvan v. Norberg, 678 F.3d 581, 587 (7th Cir. 2012). In any event, "[w]hen reviewing the denial of leave to amend based on futility, we apply de novo the legal-sufficiency standard of Rule 12(b)(6) [of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure] to determine if the proposed amended complaint fails to state a claim." O'Boyle v. Real Time Resolutions, 910 F.3d 338, 347 (7th Cir. 2018). So, the same standard applies no matter how the defendants challenged the sufficiency of the amended complaint.

As to the proposed amended complaint's adequacy, Phillips first contends that the district court's analysis was flawed because it considered whether he stated a discrimination claim under § 1981 and not § 1983. It is true that a plaintiff is not required to plead legal theories. See Chapman v. Yellow Cab Coop., 875 F.3d 846, 848 (7th Cir. 2017); ACF 2006 Corp. v. Mark C. Ladendorf, Attorney at Law, P.C., 826 F.3d 976, 981 (7th Cir. 2016) ("Making legal arguments in support...