Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-14-01358/USCOURTS-ca7-14-01358-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Robert Bauman
Appellee
Tri-Corp Housing Incorporated
Appellant

Document Text:

In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 14-1358

TRI-CORP HOUSING INCORPORATED,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

ROBERT BAUMAN,

Defendant-Appellee.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.

No. 12-C-216 — C.N. Clevert, Jr., Judge.

____________________

ARGUED DECEMBER 9, 2015 — DECIDED JUNE 13, 2016

____________________

Before EASTERBROOK and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges, and 

PALLMEYER, District Judge.*

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. Tri-Corp Housing, a nonprofit corporation, offered low-income housing to mentally disabled persons in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. Its principal 

lender, the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development 

 * Of the Northern District of Illinois, sitting by designation.

Case: 14-1358 Document: 28 Filed: 06/13/2016 Pages: 7
2 No. 14-1358

Authority, filed a foreclosure action in state court. Tri-Corp 

blamed many other persons and entities for its financial 

problems and named several of them as third-party defendants. The state judiciary allowed the lender to foreclose and 

ruled against Tri-Corp on all of the third-party claims except 

those against Robert Bauman, one of Milwaukee’s aldermen. 

Wisconsin Housing & Economic Development Authority v. Tri 

Corp Housing, Inc., 2011 WI App 99. Bauman then removed 

to federal court what remained of the case.

Tri-Corp contends that Bauman is liable to it under 42 

U.S.C. §1983 for issuing statements and press releases critical 

of its operations and for lobbying other officials to rule 

against it in administrative proceedings. For example, in 

2006 Bauman told the Board of Zoning Appeals that one of 

Tri-Corp’s facilities was “unfit for human habitation”. The 

next year, after a resident of that facility was found dead in 

his room, Bauman sent an email to Milwaukee’s Department 

of Neighborhood Services asking it to revoke the special-use 

permit under which the facility had been operating. The Department did revoke the permit, but the Board reinstated it. 

Bauman then criticized the Board to the press as complicit in 

maintaining substandard facilities; Bauman stated that TriCorp had “repeatedly demonstrated that they are unwilling 

or unable to provide quality care to ... mentally disabled residents”. We will assume, for the purpose of this appeal, that 

Bauman persuaded the Economic Development Authority to 

bring the foreclosure action—though the Authority says that 

it had begun that process on its own.

Tri-Corp calls Bauman’s statements and lobbying a form 

of interference with its contracts and maintains that he violated the Fair Housing Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the 

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No. 14-1358 3

Americans with Disabilities Act. Its theory is that Bauman’s 

speeches and lobbying hurt Tri-Corp’s business and made 

the foreclosure more likely.

Normally litigation based on those statutes invokes the 

private rights of action created by those statutes, but TriCorp is adamant that it is relying exclusively on §1983 and 

does not seek the remedies those statutes provide. That cost 

it the suit in the district court, which held that §1983 cannot 

be used to enforce any of these three statutes. 2014 U.S. Dist. 

LEXIS 7734 (E.D. Wis. Jan. 22, 2014).

We pressed Tri-Corp’s lawyer at oral argument to tell us 

why he disdains relief directly under these statutes. Counsel

lacked an answer with respect to the Fair Housing Act, 

which creates remedies in favor of entities such as Tri-Corp

that supply housing to the poor or disabled, and authorizes 

suits against governmental bodies and officials. See New 

West, L.P. v. Joliet, 491 F.3d 717, 721 (7th Cir. 2007). A claim 

directly under the Fair Housing Act would be superior to 

one under §1983, which adds a state-action requirement and 

the need to show, through the framework of Maine v. Thiboutot, 448 U.S. 1 (1980), that a §1983 remedy is appropriate. 

We shall treat the Fair Housing Act claim as one directly under the statute.

With respect to the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans 

with Disabilities Act, however, the reason for invoking §1983 

is clearer. Those statutes authorize suits by disabled persons 

against employers, places of public accommodation, and 

some governmental bodies, but a city’s alderman is not in 

any of those categories. Unless §1983 can be used to expand 

the categories of persons subject to suit under those laws, 

and to allow a claim by a provider of services rather than a 

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disabled person, Tri-Corp is going nowhere. Relying on decisions such as Blessing v. Freestone, 520 U.S. 329 (1997), and 

Rancho Palos Verdes v. Abrams, 544 U.S. 113 (2005), the district 

court held that §1983 cannot be used to override limitations 

included in a federal statutory framework. See also, e.g., 

Armstrong v. Exceptional Child Center, Inc., 135 S. Ct. 1378 

(2015) (claim cannot be based directly on the Constitution’s 

Supremacy Clause when Congress has adopted a system 

that limits private enforcement to particular methods).

Six courts of appeals have addressed this subject; all six 

come out the same way as the district court. Ramirez-Senda v. 

Puerto Rico, 528 F.3d 9, 13 n.3 (1st Cir. 2008) (ADA and Rehabilitation Act); A.W. v. Jersey City Public Schools, 486 F.3d 791, 

803–06 (3d Cir. 2007) (en banc) (Rehabilitation Act); Lollar v. 

Baker, 196 F.3d 603 (5th Cir. 1999) (Rehabilitation Act); Alsbrook v. Maumelle, 184 F.3d 999, 1010–12 (8th Cir. 1999) (en 

banc) (ADA); Vinson v. Thomas, 288 F.3d 1145 (9th Cir. 2002) 

(ADA and Rehabilitation Act); and Holbrook v. Alpharetta, 112 

F.3d 1522 (11th Cir. 1997) (ADA and Rehabilitation Act), all 

hold that §1983 cannot be used to alter the categories of persons potentially liable in private actions under the Rehabilitation Act or the Americans with Disabilities Act. We agree 

with those decisions. Tri-Corp relies on Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee, 555 U.S. 246 (2009), which holds that 

§1983 may be used to enforce Title IX of the Education 

Amendments of 1972. But Title IX, the Court held, lacks a 

comprehensive remedial scheme that could be displaced by 

the use of §1983. The Rehabilitation Act and the Americans 

with Disabilities Act, by contrast, specify in detail who may 

be sued for damages, and using §1983 to override the limits 

of those statutory lists is unwarranted.

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No. 14-1358 5

That leaves the Fair Housing Act. Although the parties 

disagree about whether Tri-Corp, which concedes that it 

lacks a claim under 42 U.S.C. §3604, might nonetheless have 

one under 42 U.S.C. §3617, the subject of Bloch v. Frischholz, 

587 F.3d 771 (7th Cir. 2009) (en banc), we do not pursue that 

topic. For Tri-Corp does not allege that Bauman himself denied it any right under the Act, or even was a member of a 

public body that did so. Tri-Corp accuses Bauman of speech, 

not action. And that’s all the difference.

Public officials such as aldermen enjoy the right of free 

speech under the First Amendment, applied to the states 

through the Fourteenth. Speech is a large part of any elected 

official’s job, in addition to being the means by which the official gets elected (or re-elected). Teddy Roosevelt called the 

presidency a “bully pulpit,” and all public officials urge their 

constituents and other public bodies to act in particular 

ways. They have every right to do so, see Novoselsky v. 

Brown, No. 15-1609 (7th Cir. May 10, 2016), as long as they 

refrain from making the kind of threats that the Supreme 

Court treats as subject to control under the approach of 

Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969). See also Swetlik v. 

Crawford, 738 F.3d 818, 829–30 (7th Cir. 2013) (concurring 

opinion). That’s why we held in Freedom from Religion Foundation, Inc. v. Obama, 641 F.3d 803 (7th Cir. 2011), that the 

President is entitled to urge all Americans to pray, even 

though the First Amendment disables the government from 

requiring them to do so.

The First Amendment prevents both state and federal 

governments from controlling political speech. It would be 

most surprising to find in the Fair Housing Act an attempt to 

penalize political speech, and Tri-Corp does not contend that 

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the statute has any language doing so. The most one could 

say is that after Texas Department of Housing and Community 

Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., 135 S. Ct. 2507

(2015), which holds that two sections of the Fair Housing Act 

authorize a mild form of review for disparate impact, a litigant might contend that speech creating a disparate impact 

should be treated the same as action. But Inclusive Communities dealt with sections 804(a) and 805(a), 42 U.S.C. 

§§ 3604(a), 3605(a). Tri-Corp does not seek relief under either 

of these sections.

We do not see in the Fair Housing Act any effort to displace the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, which the Supreme 

Court has treated as a mixture of statutory interpretation 

and constitutional imperative. See Eastern Railroad Presidents 

Conference v. Noerr Motor Freight, Inc., 365 U.S. 127 (1961);

United Mine Workers v. Pennington, 381 U.S. 657 (1965). Under 

the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, speech and other efforts to 

influence governmental activity cannot be the basis of legal 

penalties, unless the proposal to the governmental body is a 

sham and the speech itself imposes costs independent of 

what the governmental body does—for example, a lawsuit 

designed to make the other litigant bear the costs of mounting a defense, even though the suit has no chance of success. 

See BE&K Construction Co. v. NLRB, 536 U.S. 516 (2002) (recapitulating the Noerr-Pennington doctrine).

New West, 491 F.3d at 721–22, holds that the NoerrPennington doctrine applies to claims under the Fair Housing 

Act—and in New West, just as in this case, officials of one 

governmental body tried to persuade officials of a different 

public body to act in a particular way. Tri-Corp does not contend that any exception to the Noerr-Pennington doctrine apCase: 14-1358 Document: 28 Filed: 06/13/2016 Pages: 7
No. 14-1358 7

plies to Bauman’s speech and lobbying. That’s all one needs 

to say to show why Tri-Corp cannot prevail against Bauman.

AFFIRMED

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