Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-15-01805/USCOURTS-ca7-15-01805-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 442
Nature of Suit: Civil Rights Employment
Cause of Action: 

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In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 15-1805

BARBARA J. WELLS,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

WINNEBAGO COUNTY, ILLINOIS,

Defendant-Appellee.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Northern District of Illinois, Western Division.

No. 11 C 50030 — Frederick J. Kapala, Judge.

____________________

SUBMITTED MARCH 18, 2016 — DECIDED APRIL 27, 2016

____________________

Before BAUER, EASTERBROOK, and HAMILTON, Circuit 

Judges.

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. Barbara Wells worked as a 

“computer navigator” at the Winnebago County courthouse. 

Her job was to help litigants who lack counsel deal with the 

judicial system’s requirements. She contends in this suit that 

before her departure to take what she thought would be a 

better job, state and county officials discriminated against 

her on the basis of her race (she is black) and disability (she 

Case: 15-1805 Document: 19 Filed: 04/27/2016 Pages: 6
2 No. 15-1805

suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome). The district court 

granted summary judgment to the County, giving two reasons: first, any discrimination was attributable to state rather 

than county workers; second, the record would not allow a 

reasonable jury to find actionable discrimination.

Evidence would permit a jury to find that Winnebago 

County was Wells’s employer, and therefore the entity responsible for complying with federal employmentdiscrimination statutes. The County hired and paid her, was 

identified on tax forms as her employer, and so on. The district judge observed that most of the decisions that Wells 

now labels discriminatory were made by state employees—

the Circuit Court is a unit of state government. The judge 

thought that this made the County not responsible.

Yet employers must control the behavior of others in the 

workplace, so as to ensure nondiscriminatory working conditions. See, e.g., Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth, 524 U.S. 

742 (1998); Faragher v. Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775 (1998). We explained in Dunn v. Washington County Hospital, 429 F.3d 689, 

691 (7th Cir. 2005):

Because liability is direct rather than derivative, it makes no difference whether the person whose acts are complained of is an 

employee, an independent contractor, or for that matter a customer. Ability to “control” the actor plays no role. Employees are 

not puppets on strings; employers have an arsenal of incentives 

and sanctions (including discharge) that can be applied to affect 

conduct. It is the use (or failure to use) these options that makes 

an employer responsible—and in this respect independent contractors are no different from employees. Indeed, it makes no 

difference whether the actor is human. Suppose a patient [at a 

hospital] kept a macaw in his room, that the bird bit and 

scratched women but not men, and that the Hospital did nothing. The Hospital would be responsible for the decision to exCase: 15-1805 Document: 19 Filed: 04/27/2016 Pages: 6
No. 15-1805 3

pose women to the working conditions affected by the macaw, 

even though the bird (a) was not an employee, and (b) could not 

be controlled by reasoning or sanctions. It would be the Hospital’s responsibility to protect its female employees by excluding 

the offending bird from its premises. This is, by the way, the 

norm of direct liability in private law as well: a person “can be 

subject to liability for harm resulting from his conduct if he is 

negligent or reckless in permitting, or failing to prevent, negligent or other tortious conduct by persons, whether or not his 

servants or agents, upon premises or with instrumentalities under his control.” Restatement (2d) of Agency § 213(d).

See also Maalik v. International Union of Elevator Constructors, 

437 F.3d 650 (7th Cir. 2006). If the district court’s approach 

were right, then organizations would be able to avoid their 

responsibilities by dividing authority among bureaus, divisions, or agencies. The people who made the decisions could 

not be liable, because they would not be “employers”; and 

the employers could not be liable, because they let someone 

else make the decisions. The federal laws concerning employment discrimination cannot be so easily evaded.

The district court’s second reason is stronger. Wells’s job 

was to assist pro se litigants in the “Winnebago County Legal 

Self-Help Center.” Some litigants came on their own; others 

were referred by judges or the clerk’s office. Many expected 

Wells and other computer navigators to write complaints or 

fill in forms for them. When she explained that she was not a 

lawyer and could not act as their counselor—though she 

could use her computer to find and print forms and instructions they would find useful—people sometimes became 

abusive. One spat on her. Wells asked officials running the 

court’s library and administrative staff to create a barrier between her and the public. She thought that a counter might 

do (public on one side, computer navigators on the other), 

Case: 15-1805 Document: 19 Filed: 04/27/2016 Pages: 6
4 No. 15-1805

though she would have preferred a partition (a wall between 

the computer navigators and the public, with an opening, 

after the fashion of some banks, through which the public 

could speak to the navigators). She also once asked for permission to lock the door behind her when going out, so that 

no member of the public would be in the Self-Help Center 

when she returned. Wells’s supervisors declined these requests and left her exposed to direct public contact. She has 

several other grievances as well, such as lack of access to the 

court’s break room and a delayed raise.

She calls all of this race discrimination, but as the district 

court observed she produced no evidence that her race 

played any role. She was treated the same as the other computer navigators, who were white. She does not contend that 

any supervisor said anything about race or used language 

with racial connotations.

That leaves her claim about failure to accommodate a 

disability, as the Americans with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. 

§§ 12111–17, requires. The County concedes that chronic fatigue syndrome is a disability, which can impair memory 

and concentration and thus aggravate anxiety. But it maintains, and the district judge concluded, that Wells had not 

requested a counter or partition as an accommodation of a

disability. True, the record shows that she mentioned anxiety 

and at least once a month asked to be placed behind a counter or partition. But she did not link that anxiety to a qualifying disability. Many people suffer anxiety without being disabled by it. The only time she submitted medical evidence of 

a qualifying condition, the relief she requested was time 

off—which the County immediately granted. On one later 

occasion she requested time off to deal with her chronic faCase: 15-1805 Document: 19 Filed: 04/27/2016 Pages: 6
No. 15-1805 5

tigue syndrome, this time without medical documentation, 

and again her request was granted. She quit before returning 

from this second medical leave.

Interrogatory responses that Wells filed during discovery 

assert that she asked for a counter or partition as an accommodation of her chronic fatigue syndrome. She does not 

maintain, however, that she furnished any medical evidence 

to back up her contention that her disability adversely affected her ability to deal with the public in an open setting—

and, perhaps more to the point, she did not rely on these interrogatory responses either in the district court (when opposing summary judgment) or in her appellate briefs. Instead she has relied exclusively on the many times she told 

supervisors about her anxiety.

She needed to establish that the County was required to 

treat her references to anxiety as notices of a link between 

her disability and her working conditions that would set off 

the process of considering possible accommodations. Even 

in this litigation she has not offered medical evidence

demonstrating that a reasonable employer would understand every mention of an employee’s anxiety as a disability

or understand, without medical knowledge, how anxiety 

and chronic fatigue syndrome are related. Certainly Wells

did not provide such evidence to her employer. “[O]ur cases 

have consistently held that disabled employees must make 

their employers aware of any nonobvious, medically necessary accommodations with corroborating evidence such as a 

doctor’s note or at least orally relaying a statement from a 

doctor, before an employer may be required under the 

ADA’s reasonableness standard to provide a specific modest 

Case: 15-1805 Document: 19 Filed: 04/27/2016 Pages: 6
6 No. 15-1805

accommodation”. Ekstrand v. School District of Somerset, 583 

F.3d 972, 976 (7th Cir. 2009).

In sum, the two requests that Wells expressly made on 

account of disability both sought time off, and both requests 

were granted. The record does not show that she supported 

any other request with the sort of medical evidence that the 

ADA contemplates. The district court therefore properly 

granted the County’s motion for summary judgment.

AFFIRMED

Case: 15-1805 Document: 19 Filed: 04/27/2016 Pages: 6