Task: songer_realresp

What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
Your task is to determine whether or not the formally listed respondents in the case are the "real parties." That is, are they the parties whose real interests are most directly at stake? (e.g., in some appeals of adverse habeas corpus petition decisions, the respondent is listed as the judge who denied the petition, but the real parties are the prisoner and the warden of the prison) (another example would be "Jones v A 1990 Rolls Royce" where Jones is a drug agent trying to seize a car which was transporting drugs - the real party would be the owner of the car). For cases in which an independent regulatory agency is the listed respondent, the following rule was adopted: If the agency initiated the action to enforce a federal rule or the agency was sued by a litigant contesting an agency action, then the agency was coded as a real party. However, if the agency initially only acted as a forum to settle a dispute between two other litigants, and the agency is only listed as a party because its ruling in that dispute is at issue, then the agency is considered not to be a real party. For example, if a union files an unfair labor practices charge against a corporation, the NLRB hears the dispute and rules for the union, and then the NLRB petitions the court of appeals for enforcement of its ruling in an appeal entitled "NLRB v Widget Manufacturing, INC." the NLRB would be coded as not a real party. Note that under these definitions, trustees are usually "real parties" and parents suing on behalf of their children and a spouse suing on behalf of their injured or dead spouse are also "real parties."

PER CURIAM.
This is a Title VII action in which Shirley Pierce alleges that she was discharged from her employment with the Oakland County Board of Auditors on account of her race. The District Court dismissed the complaint on the ground that the statute of limitations had run, and Pierce appeals.
Pierce was discharged from her employment in May of 1970. On May 13, 1970, she filed a complaint with the Michigan Civil Rights Commission alleging that her firing was racially motivated. For a period of about five years the Commission did virtually nothing about the complaint, which Pierce withdrew in October of 1975. On January 28, 1976, she filed this action. The defendants’ answer did not raise the expiration of the statute of limitations as an affirmative defense. Nor did the defendants raise the defense at any of the three pre-trial conferences, although they apparently mentioned at one conference that they intended to raise a jurisdictional defense.
The case was set for trial on June 12, 1979. The defendants moved on that day to dismiss the action for failure to state a claim upon which relief could be granted because the statute of limitations had run. The District Court noted that, as a general rule, this was an affirmative defense which must be pleaded in the answer. It further observed, however, that when an affirmative defense appears on the face of the complaint, a complaint is subject to dismissal for failure to state a claim notwithstanding a defendant’s failure to plead the affirmative defense. Because it was apparent from the face of the complaint that the three-year statute of limitations had run, the District Court granted the motion to dismiss. We affirm.
This court has expressed the view that an affirmative defense based on the statute of limitations must be pleaded in order to support a dismissal. Crawford v. Zeitler, 326 F.2d 119 (6th Cir. 1964). See also United States v. Masonry Contractor’s Assoc. of Memphis, 497 F.2d 871 (6th Cir. 1974). However, earlier Sixth Circuit eases have held that an affirmative defense is not waived, even though not specifically pleaded, where the defense clearly appears on the face of the pleading and is raised in a motion to dismiss. Berry v. Chrysler, 150 F.2d 1002 (6th Cir. 1945); A. G. Reeves Steel Construction Co. v. Weiss, 119 F.2d 472 (6th Cir.), cert. denied, 314 U.S. 677, 62 S.Ct. 181, 86 L.Ed. 541 (1941). This rule has been followed by lower courts in this circuit, see Heller v. Smither, 437 F.Supp. 1 (D.C.Tenn.1977), aff’d, 578 F.2d 1380 (6th Cir. 1978); Overseas Motors Inc. v. Import Motors Limited, Inc., 375 F.Supp. 499 (E.D. Mich.1974), aff’d, 519 F.2d 119 (6th Cir.), cert. denied, 423 U.S. 987, 96 S.Ct. 395, 46 L.Ed.2d 304 (1975), and is in our view the general rule applicable in this circuit. See also 5 Wright & Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure, § 1277 at 332, § 1309 at 439 (1969).
It is clear, therefore, that the defense was not waived simply because it was raised in a motion to dismiss rather than in the answer. To so hold “would be reminiscent of the days of common law pleading when the strict rules and forms of pleading were sovereign and frequently were permitted to prevail over substance.” Hayden v. Ford Motor Company, 497 F.2d 1292, 1294 (6th Cir. 1974).
We also hold that the circumstances of this case do not compel a finding that defendants waived the defense by failing to raise it for three and one-half years. Appellant did not forego other avenues of relief in reliance on defendants’ failure to raise the defense, see Hayden, supra; Estes v. Kentucky Utilities Co., 636 F.2d 1131 (6th Cir. 1980); nor has appellant suffered litigation expenses sufficient to warrant the preclusion of the defense in a pretrial motion to dismiss. Id. at 1134-35.
The judgment of the District Court is affirmed.

Question: Are the formally listed respondents in the case the "real parties", that is, are they the parties whose real interests are most directly at stake?
A. both 1st and 2nd listed respondents are real parties (or only one respondent, and that respondent is a real party)
B. the 1st respondent is not a real party
C. the 2nd respondent is not a real party
D. neither the 1st nor the 2nd respondents are real parties
E. not ascertained
Answer:

Answer: A