Opinion ID: 791778
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The substantive Rooker-Feldman requirements

Text: 20 Underlying the Rooker-Feldman doctrine is the principle, expressed by Congress in 28 U.S.C. § 1257, that within the federal judicial system, only the Supreme Court may review state-court decisions. 5 That principle animates the two substantive requirements for Rooker-Feldman 's application outlined in Exxon Mobil: 1) the federal plaintiff must complain of injury from a state-court judgment; and 2) the federal plaintiff must seek federal-court review and rejection of the state-court judgment. 21 Exxon Mobil declares these requirements but scarcely elaborates on what they might mean. The Court does, however, give some negative guidance as to what cases are not captured by the requirements. The Court points out that 28 U.S.C. § 1257 (and thus Rooker-Feldman ) does not deprive a district court of subject-matter jurisdiction 22 simply because a party attempts to litigate in federal court a matter previously litigated in state court. If a federal plaintiff present[s] some independent claim, albeit one that denies a legal conclusion that a state court has reached in a case to which he was a party . . ., then there is jurisdiction and state law determines whether the defendant prevails under principles of preclusion. 23 544 U.S. at ___, 125 S.Ct. at 1527 (quoting GASH Assocs., 995 F.2d at 728; alterations in Exxon Mobil ). This language describes a set of federal suits — those raising independent claims — that are outside Rooker-Feldman 's compass even if they involve the identical subject matter and parties as previous state-court suits. 24 The voters' federal suit is therefore barred by Rooker-Feldman only if it complains of injury from the state-court judgment and seeks review and rejection of that judgment, but not if it raises some independent claim. How do we determine whether a federal suit raises an independent, non-barred claim? At first glance, one might think that a federal claim is independent of claims raised in state court if the federal claim is premised on a theory not passed upon by the state court. Indeed, the voters make essentially this argument, asserting that Rooker-Feldman does not apply because the voters raise a Fourteenth Amendment argument and thus are not seeking review of the state court's decision[,] which was strictly limited to state law. . . . 25 Just presenting in federal court a legal theory not raised in state court, however, cannot insulate a federal plaintiff's suit from Rooker-Feldman if the federal suit nonetheless complains of injury from a state-court judgment and seeks to have that state-court judgment reversed. Feldman itself makes this plain. Prior to Feldman, the Fifth Circuit held in Dasher v. Supreme Court of Texas, 658 F.2d 1045, 1051 (5th Cir.1981), that a federal district court had subject-matter jurisdiction, notwithstanding 28 U.S.C. § 1257, to hear a plaintiff's constitutional challenge to a state-court judgment denying the plaintiff admission to the state bar, provided the state court had not passed on the constitutional issues raised in the federal suit. The Court took pains in Feldman to explain that Dasher was wrong: such federal constitutional claims, even if not raised in state court, are inextricably intertwined with the challenged state-court judgment denying bar admission, and therefore a federal district court lacks jurisdiction over such claims because the district court is in essence being called upon to review the state-court decision. Feldman, 460 U.S. at 483-84 n. 16, 103 S.Ct. 1303. 26 The inextricably intertwined language from Feldman led lower federal courts, including this court in Moccio, 95 F.3d at 199-200, to apply Rooker-Feldman too broadly. In light of Exxon Mobil — which quotes Feldman 's use of the phrase but does not otherwise explicate or employ it, 544 U.S. at ___, 125 S.Ct. at 1523 & n.1 — it appears that describing a federal claim as inextricably intertwined with a state-court judgment only states a conclusion. Rooker-Feldman bars a federal claim, whether or not raised in state court, that asserts injury based on a state judgment and seeks review and reversal of that judgment; such a claim is inextricably intertwined with the state judgment. But the phrase inextricably intertwined has no independent content. It is simply a descriptive label attached to claims that meet the requirements outlined in Exxon Mobil. 27 Are the voters' federal constitutional claims independent of the state-court judgment, or does the voters' federal suit assert injury based on a state judgment and seek review and reversal of that judgment (i.e., are the voters' federal claims inextricably intertwined with the state judgment)? We begin by asking whether the voters' suit seeks review and reversal of the state-court judgment. In one sense, no: the voters do not want the federal court to evaluate the state court's reasoning (i.e., the federal court need not review the substance of the state-court judgment). But we know, as explained above, that a federal suit is not free from Rooker-Feldman 's bar simply because the suit proceeds on legal theories not addressed in state court. 28 More importantly, even if what the voters seek in federal court is not review in some sense, the voters do seem to seek reversal: the state court ordered the Board not to count the voters' ballots, and the voters want the federal court to order the Board to count the ballots. Because the Board cannot comply with both the state-court order and the desired federal-court order, the federal-court order, if granted, would seem to reverse the state-court judgment. 29 On the other hand, we know that an independent (and therefore non-barred) claim may `den[y] a legal conclusion' reached by the state court. Exxon Mobil, 544 U.S. at ___, 125 S.Ct. at 1527 (quoting GASH Assocs., 995 F.2d at 728). Precisely what this means is not clear from either Exxon Mobil or GASH Associates (the original source of the language), but it suggests that a plaintiff who seeks in federal court a result opposed to the one he achieved in state court does not, for that reason alone, run afoul of Rooker-Feldman. 30 The key to resolving this uncertainty lies in the second substantive Rooker-Feldman requirement: that federal plaintiffs are not subject to the Rooker-Feldman bar unless they complain of an injury caused by a state judgment. Indeed, this is the core requirement from which the others derive; focusing on it helps clarify when the doctrine applies. 31 First, this requirement explains why a federal plaintiff cannot escape the Rooker-Feldman bar simply by relying on a legal theory not raised in state court. Suppose a state court, based purely on state law, terminates a father's parental rights and orders the state to take custody of his son. If the father sues in federal court for the return of his son on grounds that the state judgment violates his federal substantive due-process rights as a parent, he is complaining of an injury caused by the state judgment and seeking its reversal. This he may not do, regardless of whether he raised any constitutional claims in state court, because only the Supreme Court may hear appeals from state-court judgments. 32 Further, by focusing on the requirement that the state-court judgment be the source of the injury, we can see how a suit asking a federal court to den[y] a legal conclusion reached by a state court could nonetheless be independent for Rooker-Feldman purposes. Suppose a plaintiff sues his employer in state court for violating both state anti-discrimination law and Title VII and loses. If the plaintiff then brings the same suit in federal court, he will be seeking a decision from the federal court that denies the state court's conclusion that the employer is not liable, but he will not be alleging injury from the state judgment. Instead, he will be alleging injury based on the employer's discrimination. The fact that the state court chose not to remedy the injury does not transform the subsequent federal suit on the same matter into an appeal, forbidden by Rooker-Feldman , of the state-court judgment. 6 33 The voters' claims in this case seem at first to complain only of the Board's refusal to tally their votes rather than of any injury caused by the state court's judgment. Matters are complicated, however, by the fact that in refusing to tally the votes, the Board is acting under compulsion of a state-court order. Can a federal plaintiff avoid Rooker-Feldman simply by clever pleading — by alleging that actions taken pursuant to a court order violate his rights without ever challenging the court order itself? Surely not. In the child-custody example given above, if the state has taken custody of a child pursuant to a state judgment, the parent cannot escape Rooker-Feldman simply by alleging in federal court that he was injured by the state employees who took his child rather than by the judgment authorizing them to take the child. The example shows that in some circumstances, federal suits that purport to complain of injury by individuals in reality complain of injury by state-court judgments. The challenge is to identify such suits. 34 The following formula guides our inquiry: a federal suit complains of injury from a state-court judgment, even if it appears to complain only of a third party's actions, when the third party's actions are produced by a state-court judgment and not simply ratified, acquiesced in, or left unpunished by it. Where a state-court judgment causes the challenged third-party action, any challenge to that third-party action is necessarily the kind of challenge to the state judgment that only the Supreme Court can hear. This formula dovetails with the Rooker-Feldman requirement about timing that we have termed procedural, i.e., the requirement that the federal suit be initiated after the challenged state judgment. If federal suits cannot be barred by Rooker-Feldman unless they complain of injuries produced by state-court judgments, it follows that no federal suit that precedes a state-court judgment will be barred; the injury such a federal suit seeks to remedy cannot have been produced by a state-court judgment that did not exist at the federal suit's inception. 35 Applying this formula, we find that the voters' federal suit does complain of an injury caused by the state-court judgment and seek that judgment's reversal. It thus meets Rooker-Feldman 's substantive requirements. In determining that the voters' injury was produced by the state-court judgment directing the Board not to count their ballots, rather than by the Board's action in refusing to count their ballots, we look at both the allegations in the voters' federal complaint and the records of the state-court proceedings. 36 The allegations in the voters' complaint are somewhat ambiguous as to whether the injury they seek to have remedied — the Board's refusal to count their ballots — preceded, and thus was not produced by, a state-court decision. While the Board was canvassing the ballots, various candidates objected to the counting of certain absentee ballots. The Board decided not to count ballots to which objections were lodged. The wording of the complaint suggests that the Board intended to shunt responsibility for deciding which ballots to count to the state court: the voters allege that [b]y agreement, the Board of Elections did not open the absentee ballots until the State Court could rule on them. Compl. at ¶ 39. 37 The state trial court's opinion, however, makes plain that the Board, had it been left to its own devices, would have counted the 40 absentee ballots issued based on November 2003 absentee-ballot applications. Gross I, slip op. at 3. The Board argued in state court that the ballots were valid and should be counted, and but for the state court's judgment ordering the Board not to do so, the Board would have counted the challenged absentee ballots. The state-court judgment did not ratify, acquiesce in, or leave unpunished an anterior decision by the Board not to count the ballots. Instead, the state-court judgment produced the Board's refusal to count the ballots, the very injury of which the voters complain. Whether Rooker-Feldman bars the voters' federal suit therefore turns on whether their suit meets the remaining procedural requirements pertaining to timing and party identity outlined in Exxon Mobil. 38