In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 17-2802

TIBERIU KLEIN,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

DANIEL E. O’BRIEN, et al.,

Defendants-Appellees.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

No. 16 C 11008 — Harry D. Leinenweber, Judge.

____________________

ARGUED FEBRUARY 20, 2018 — DECIDED MARCH 9, 2018

____________________

Before WOOD, Chief Judge, and EASTERBROOK and 

BARRETT, Circuit Judges.

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. In 2002 a Greyhound bus 

struck and killed Claudia Zvunca in Colorado. Her daughter, Cristina Zvunca, witnessed the accident. Cristina was 

seven at the time. Now an adult, she is the administrator of 

her mother’s estate. In 2016 Cristina seZled all claims against 

Greyhound and other potentially responsible persons for 

approximately $5 million. But Tiberiu Klein, who was Clau-
2 No. 17-2802

dia’s husband at the time of the accident and is Cristina’s 

stepfather, believes that Cristina allocated too much of the 

seZlement to herself (via damages for emotional distress) 

and not enough to him or Claudia’s estate, from which he

would benefit. He contends in this federal suit under 42 

U.S.C. §1983 that Cristina conspired with state judges, law 

firms, Greyhound, and just about anyone else who had anything to do with the accident or the litigation, to exclude him 

from financial benefits to which he claims entitlement.

Sixteen years is a long time to deal with an accident, but 

litigation in state court went off the rails when Klein sued as 

the purported administrator of Claudia’s estate. This 

spawned a host of problems, for Klein had not been appointed as administrator. Eventually Klein and Cristina became co-administrators, but Klein was soon removed by a 

state judge, leaving Cristina in charge. That has not prevented Klein from continuing to describe himself as coadministrator of Claudia’s estate—this very suit was filed 

using that false description—and from aZempting to manage or block the tort litigation. The district judge’s thorough

opinion describes the many state-court suits and decisions. 

2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 121233 at *3–8 (N.D. Ill. Aug. 1, 2017). 

Those details do not maZer for current purposes.

Defendants asked the federal judge to dismiss this suit as 

barred by the Rooker-Feldman doctrine—the rule that only the 

Supreme Court of the United States has jurisdiction to review the decisions of state courts in civil litigation. See Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co., 263 U.S. 413 (1923); District of Columbia 

Court of Appeals v. Feldman, 460 U.S. 462 (1983). Klein did not 

ask the federal judge to set aside any particular state judgment; instead he wants damages for injury that he traces not 
No. 17-2802 3

only to Claudia’s death but also to events in or concerning

the state litigation. But defendants contended that any federal suit whose issues overlap those in the state litigation must 

be dismissed.

Aware that the Supreme Court has understood the Rooker-Feldman doctrine as limited to federal proceedings that ask 

state judgments themselves to be changed, see, e.g., Exxon 

Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Industries Corp., 544 U.S. 280 (2005); 

Lance v. Dennis, 546 U.S. 459 (2006); Skinner v. SwiIer, 562 

U.S. 521, 531–33 (2011), the district court addressed the merits rather than dismissing for lack of jurisdiction. See also

Milchtein v. Chisholm, 880 F.3d 895 (7th Cir. 2018) (deprecating arguments that all maZers intertwined with state cases 

are outside federal jurisdiction). Although the district court’s 

opinion is long, it boils down to a simple proposition: if anything went wrong during the state litigation, the proper step 

is to ask the rendering court to modify its judgment to correct the problem. See, e.g., Harris Trust & Savings Bank v. Ellis, 810 F.2d 700, 705–06 (7th Cir. 1987); Mains v. Citibank, 

N.A., 852 F.3d 669, 676–77 (7th Cir. 2017). Collateral litigation 

in federal court is blocked not only by principles of preclusion—Klein is bound by the state judiciary’s decisions about 

what goes into Claudia’s estate and whether Klein can act as 

the estate’s administrator—but also by the rule articulated in

Rooker that errors commiZed during the course of state litigation cannot be treated as federal constitutional torts:

If the constitutional questions stated in the [federal suit] actually 

arose in the [state] cause, it was the province and duty of the 

state courts to decide them; and their decision, whether right or 

wrong, was an exercise of jurisdiction. If the decision was wrong, 

that did not make the judgment void, but merely left it open to 

reversal or modification in an appropriate and timely appellate 
4 No. 17-2802

proceeding. Unless and until so reversed or modified, it would 

be an effective and conclusive adjudication.

263 U.S. at 415.

Because the district court dismissed the suit on the merits

rather than for lack of jurisdiction, we expected Klein’s brief 

to engage the merits. But it did not. Instead Klein argued at 

length that the Rooker-Feldman doctrine does not foreclose 

federal jurisdiction. Where’s the beef? Instead of briefing issues decided in his favor, Klein had to brief those issues on 

which he lost. We do not think that he had much prospect of 

upseZing the district court’s decision, but an appellate brief 

that does not even try to engage the reasons the appellant 

lost has no prospect of success. All of Klein’s federal contentions have been forfeited.

The long and tangled history of the wrongful-death litigation, which the district court’s opinion recounts, has been 

caused by Klein’s (or his lawyer’s) inability or unwillingness 

to litigate as statutes and rules require. That in this suit 

Klein’s aZorney John Xydakis pretended that Klein is a coadministrator of Claudia’s estate, then forfeited all of his client’s substantive arguments, are just the latest manifestations of these problems. Xydakis also named himself as a 

plaintiff in this suit, though he has no conceivable standing 

to sue. The district court dismissed Xydakis’s claim for lack 

of jurisdiction; after appealing on his own behalf as well as 

Klein’s, Xydakis filed a brief ignoring the question whether 

he is entitled to litigate as a party. After oral argument

Xydakis moved to dismiss himself as a litigant. We grant 

that motion but record the episode to show how far Klein 

and his lawyer have strayed from the norms of litigation.
No. 17-2802 5

When asked at oral argument why his brief addressed 

the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, on which Klein had prevailed, 

rather than the merits, on which he had lost, Xydakis told us 

that because the defendants invoked the Rooker-Feldman doctrine that must have been the district court’s ground of decision, no maZer what the judge’s opinion said. That’s nonsense. If Xydakis believed that the district judge erred in

making a substantive decision in response to a jurisdictional 

motion, he should have asked the judge for an opportunity 

to brief the merits, or he might have contended on appeal 

that the judge erred by denying him that opportunity. Instead Xydakis chose to pretend that his client lost on a jurisdictional ground. Pretense gets a lawyer nowhere.

Just to be sure that this case had been decided on the merits rather than for lack of jurisdiction, we turned to the back 

of Klein’s brief to find the judgment. It is not there, despite 

Circuit Rule 30(a), which requires the judgment to be 

aZached to the appellant’s brief, and Circuit Rule 30(d), 

which requires counsel to certify that all materials required 

elsewhere in Rule 30 have indeed been included. Xydakis so 

certified, falsely. At oral argument we asked him why; he did 

not explain. It soon became clear that Xydakis has no idea 

what a “judgment” is. The afternoon of oral argument he 

sent a leZer to the court stating that he had been asked 

where the district court’s “opinion” could be found and that 

it is aZached to the brief. But he had been asked about the 

judgment, which under Fed. R. Civ. P. 58 is distinct from the 

opinion. We tracked down the judgment and found that it

corresponds to the opinion: it resolves the suit in defendants’ 

favor on the merits rather than dismissing, without prejudice, for lack of jurisdiction.
6 No. 17-2802

Klein and Xydakis have caused havoc in the tort litigation. They are not entitled to divert the time of federal judges, too, from the needs of more deserving litigants. Klein and 

Xydakis must understand that they have reached the end of 

the line in federal court. Any further federal litigation related 

to the 2002 accident, and the state suits to which it gave rise, 

will be penalized under Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(c), Fed. R. App. P. 

38 and 46(b), (c), 28 U.S.C. §1927, and other sources of authority to deal with frivolous and repetitious suits.

AFFIRMED