Opinion ID: 186146
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Claim I issues

Text: We review de novo the district court’s decision to grant American summary judgment, viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the Cruzes, the nonmoving parties. The district court’s summary-judgment ruling should be affirmed only if American has satisfied its burden of showing that there is no genuine issue of material fact about whether it is entitled to judgment. Tao v. Freeh, 27 F.3d 635, 638 (D.C. Cir. 1994). We may reverse a district court’s refusal to certify a class only if it abused its discretion or applied incorrect legal criteria in doing so. Hartman v. Duffey, 19 F.3d 1459, 1471 (D.C. Cir. 1994). The district court’s decision not to order notice to the class is also a matter within the district court’s ‘‘discretion,’’ Larionoff v. United States, 533 F.2d 1167, 1186 n.44 (D.C. Cir. 1976), and so we will also reverse that only if the decision was an abuse of discretion. 1. Plaintiffs’ challenge to the prospective enforcement of the 30–day rule. The district court correctly found that the Cruzes lack Article III standing to obtain an injunction forbidding American from enforcing its 30–day rule and a declaration that this rule is unlawful. To establish standing, the Cruzes must show that American’s actions have caused them some concrete injury that this declaratory and injunctive relief will redress. Fla. Audubon Soc’y v. Bentsen, 94 F.3d 658, 663 (D.C. Cir. 1996) (en banc). The Cruzes have made no such showing. In particular, they have not shown that their challenge to the prospective enforcement of American’s 30–day policy will redress any concrete injury they have asserted. Plaintiffs have alleged the loss of their luggage on American flights; 13 but a prospective injunction against future applications of the 30–day rule will do nothing to remedy that past harm. There is a chance that plaintiffs could lose their luggage on a future American flight; but plaintiffs have not alleged, much less presented evidence, that they have any such travel plans. Even if they did, the likelihood that American would, once again, lose plaintiffs’ luggage is minuscule. And even assuming plaintiffs lost their luggage on another international American flight, the likelihood that they would again file their claims late is small, given their previous experience with American; indeed, Beato Cruz’s actions – he filed his second claim for reimbursement on time – shows that these oncewronged plaintiffs are unlikely to file their claims late again. Even then, it is unlikely that American would again reject any late-filed claim, given the litigation its 30–day rule spawned and given that it has disavowed the 30–day rule. Plaintiffs’ speculative interest in prospectively challenging the 30–day rule parallels the one the Supreme Court found fell short of establishing a concrete interest in City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95 (1983). In Lyons, a person whom police officers stopped and applied a chokehold to sued the City of Los Angeles and the officers for money damages and an injunction declaring that this practice was unlawful. Id. at 97–98. The Supreme Court held that the plaintiff lacked standing to seek the injunctive remedy, since it was highly unlikely that the plaintiff would be again stopped by the police and subjected to the same sort of chokehold. Id. at 107–08. Therefore, the Court reasoned, the plaintiff had no concrete interest in obtaining a prospective injunction. The reasoning of Lyons applies to the claims before us. It is not likely that plaintiffs will again lose their luggage on an international American flight, much less again be denied compensation as a result of the misapplication of the 30–day rule. Though plaintiffs dismiss Lyons as involving a ‘‘wholly concluded and unlikely to be repeated incident of a police choke-hold,’’ that characterization aptly describes plaintiffs’ asserted injury as well. 14 2. Plaintiffs’ request for a retrospective injunction ordering American to process their claims and offer to settle their claims. Plaintiffs argue that the district court’s decision to grant American summary judgment failed to consider a separate claim for injunctive relief – a claim for a retrospective injunction ordering American to ‘‘process’’ plaintiffs’ compensation claims without regard to American’s 30–day rule. This assertion challenges the district court’s summary-judgment ruling that the Cruzes lacked standing to assert their Claim I requests ‘‘for declaratory and injunctive relief regarding [American’s] 30–day rule.’’ The district court never addressed plaintiffs’ request for a retrospective, as opposed to a prospective, injunction and declaration, but that was because the Cruzes’ lawyer failed to apprise the district court of it sufficiently. We therefore decline to address its merits. We root this decision in our well-established discretion not to consider claims that litigants fail to raise sufficiently below and on which district courts do not pass. See Singleton v. Wulff, 428 U.S. 106, 120–21 (1976). The issue is whether, in light of the policy of this rule to ‘‘encourage[ ] parties to communicate with each other and the trial judge,’’ Edmond v. U.S. Postal Serv., 949 F.2d 415, 422 (D.C. Cir. 1991), plaintiffs apprised the district court with sufficient clarity of this challenge to its summary-judgment ruling. They did not. Plaintiffs never mentioned this request in their pleadings. Their revised complaint, in particular, contained no hint of this odd request for an injunction, as plaintiffs’ counsel conceded when pressed at oral argument. Nor did their summary-judgment papers, although those papers did stress the uncontroversial (and distinct) proposition that American has a duty to compensate passengers whose luggage it loses. The first clue plaintiffs gave the district court of their new theory came in their reply to American’s opposition to their motion to certify the Claim I class – filed nearly four years after the Cruzes’ filed their initial complaint. 15 This tardy, oblique assertion of the claim was not sufficient to apprise the district court of the need to address this issue in its summary-judgment ruling. Because plaintiffs asserted it only in their class-certification papers, rather than their summary-judgment papers, they did not give the district court a square chance to decide the question at the summary judgment stage. Plaintiffs, in particular, never made the argument that they had standing to assert this claim, and thus that American’s motion to dismiss the Claim I claims for injunctive relief should have been denied. Nor did plaintiffs make this argument clear to the district court after the district court entered its order dismissing Claim I to the extent it requested ‘‘declaratory and injunctive relief regarding [American’s] 30–day rule.’’ Plaintiffs, most damningly, never raised their retrospective injunctive claim as a reason for the district court to reconsider its summaryjudgment ruling, although plaintiffs moved for reconsideration on other grounds. True, plaintiffs, in their renewed motion for class certification, identified the claim as a common issue that might warrant certifying the class. By then, however, the district court had granted American’s motion for summary judgment as to Claim I injunctive relief related to the 30–day rule, removing those claims from the case. When plaintiffs belatedly argued that their new injunctive claim presented a common issue ripe for class adjudication, the district court, understandably, rejected it on the ground that it had already dismissed plaintiffs’ injunctive claims. The district court properly treated the unchallenged portions of its summary-judgment order as the law of the case. Summary-judgment motions could not perform their function of simplifying and narrowing disputed issues if district courts had an obligation to reconsider, in light of the implications of other positions taken by litigants, such rulings sua sponte. Plaintiffs’ attempt to excuse their 11th-hour change of course does not succeed. They attempt to assign the blame to American, asserting that their shift simply reacted to ‘‘American’s assertion, first made in its summary judgment papers, that it was free, as a matter of business policy, to reject or refuse to process, class member damage claims, 16 whether or not its 30–day rule was unlawful or properly applied.’’ This is both backward and wrong. It is wrong because American, to our knowledge, has never made such an assertion. American conceded below, in its brief, and at oral argument, that it may have a duty to compensate some (but not all) class members whose claims it rejected on the basis of its (now-abandoned) 30–day rule, and thus that it was not ‘‘free’’ to reject those claims. It is backward because plaintiffs, not American, are the ones who shifted course. Nothing prevented the Cruzes from making this argument either in the four years that passed before the district court granted summary judgment against them or in their reconsideration motion. This inaction moves us, in our discretion, to decline to consider the merits of the issue now. Finally, it is appropriate for us to determine that the claim was not sufficiently raised below, and therefore is not properly before us, without addressing whether plaintiffs have Article III standing to raise the claim. This approach is entirely consistent with the rule that courts must address issues relating to subject matter jurisdiction before reaching the merits of a case. See Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Env’t, 523 U.S. 83, 101–02 (1998). As the Supreme Court has explained, ‘‘a court that dismisses on other non-merits grounds TTT makes no assumption of law-declaring power that violates the separation of powers principles’’ underlying the Steel Company rule. Ruhrgas AG v. Marathon Oil Co., 526 U.S. 574, 585 (1999) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). By declining to consider plaintiffs’ retrospective injunctive claim, we are, within our discretion, simply declining to exercise jurisdiction over it. As Steel Company itself recognized, it is permissible to do that without determining whether plaintiffs have Article III standing to assert their claim for a retrospective injunction. See 523 U.S. at 100 n.3. 3. Class certification Because plaintiffs’ claim for retrospective injunctive relief is not properly before us, we can easily dispose of plaintiffs’ 17 assertion that the district court abused its discretion in not certifying the Claim I class. As discussed more fully above, the district court declined to certify the Claim I class because the class members’ damages claims presented individualized issues not common to all class members. Plaintiffs do not challenge this conclusion on appeal. Instead, plaintiffs assert that their injunctive claims, rather than their damages claims, are common issues that can be adjudicated class wide. Those claims, however, are out of this case now that we have concluded that plaintiffs either lack standing to raise their injunctive claims or have not preserved them for appeal. These conclusions therefore also refute plaintiffs’ certification argument. The district court neither erred nor abused its discretion in declining to certify the class on a ground that plaintiffs do not challenge on appeal. 4. Notice The district court did not abuse its discretion in denying plaintiffs’ ‘‘contingent motion for disclosure and notification’’ – in essence, a request that the district court order notice, pursuant to Rule 23(d)(2), to a non-certified class. We doubt, as a threshold matter, that a district court has any discretion to order notice ‘‘in the conduct of [an] action[ ]’’ in which it has declined to certify any class whatsoever, for such an action may well not be one ‘‘to which [Rule 23] applies.’’ Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(d)(2). Setting that point aside, however, the district court, at a minimum, did not abuse its discretion by declining to order notice to this putative class given that it found the remaining issues in the case were unsuitable for class treatment at all, and given that there was no reversible error in that finding.