Opinion ID: 203513
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: English Language Requirement in the Federal Courts In Puerto Rico

Text: The district court erred in granting a motion to dismiss that turned entirely on an untranslated Spanish language decision of the Puerto Rico Supreme Court. Defendants, as the moving parties, had the obligation to provide the district court with a certified English translation of the Puerto Rico Supreme Court decision of December 29, 2006, on which they relied for both arguments in their motion to dismiss. Under 48 U.S.C. § 864, [a]ll pleadings and proceedings in the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico shall be conducted in the English language. We have enforced the rule where the Spanish language document or matter is key to the outcome of the proceedings in the district court. In González-De-Blasini v. Family Department, we held that [t]he district court should not have considered any documents before it that were in the Spanish language. 377 F.3d 81, 89 (1st Cir. 2004). Violations of the English requirement will constitute reversible error whenever the appellant can demonstrate that the untranslated evidence has the potential to affect the disposition of an issue raised on appeal. United States v. Rivera-Rosario, 300 F.3d 1, 10 (1st Cir.2002). By contrast, where it is crystal clear that none of [the Spanish language documents] bear on any of the issues that the [district] court found dispositive in adjudicating, the presence of untranslated documents will not constitute reversible error. Dávila v. Corporación De P.R. Para La Difusión Pública, 498 F.3d 9, 13 (1st Cir.2007). Here it is crystal clear that the Puerto Rico Supreme Court opinion, which was not translated from the Spanish, provided the very basis for the dismissal of the action on both grounds. The defendants relied on the untranslated opinion both to make their Rooker-Feldman argument and their res judicata arguments. Where a party makes a motion to dismiss based on a decision that was written in a foreign language, the party must provide the district court with and put into the record an English translation of the decision. There are many policy reasons for strictly enforcing the statute's English-language rule in these circumstances, outlined in our prior cases. See Estades-Negroni v. Assocs. Corp. of N. Am., 359 F.3d 1, 2 (1st Cir.2004). Allowing the outcome of a case to turn on a non-English language document would be at odds with the premise of a unified and integrated federal courts system, id., and effectively exclude the public from access to court decisions. The policy interest in keeping the District of Puerto Rico as an integrated part of the federal judiciary is too great to allow parties to convert that court into a Spanish language court at their whim. Rivera-Rosario, 300 F.3d at 8 n. 9. There is nothing new about the law in this area, and the failure of defendants to provide a translated copy of a critical decision alone warranted denial of their motion.