Opinion ID: 196728
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Public/Private Conspiracies.

Text: effort to bypass the point entirely centers around his insistence that the requirement of a class-based discriminatory animus applies only to wholly private conspiracies (that is, conspiracies that do not involve public officials acting as such), and that he need neither allege nor prove a class-based animus in this action (which is directed at a conspiracy that allegedly involves public officials doing the public's business). This gambit has been tried in several other circuits and has uniformly been found wanting. See Bisbee v. Bey, 39 F.3d 1096, 1102 (10th Cir. 1994), cert. denied, 115 S. Ct. 2577 (1995); Haverstick Enterps., Inc. v. Financial Fed. Credit, Inc., 32 F.2d 989, 994 (6th Cir. 1994); Gagliardi v. Village of Pawling, 18 F.3d 188, 194 (2d Cir. 1994); Burrell v. Board of Trustees of Ga. Military Coll., 970 F.2d 785, 794 (11th Cir. 1992), cert. denied, 507 U.S. 1018 (1993); Munson v. Friske, 754 F.2d 683, 694-95 & n.8 (7th Cir. 1985). Although this court has never squarely repudiated the gambit, we have on at least two occasions required (albeit without substantive comment) that a class-based animus be shown notwithstanding that public officials were alleged to be active participants in the particular conspiracies there at issue. See Romero-Barcelo v. Hernandez- Agosto, 75 F.3d 23, 34 (1st Cir. 1996); Daley v. Town of New Durham, 733 F.2d 4, 7 (1st Cir. 1984). Thus, following the path down which the plaintiff beckons not only would set us apart from our sister circuits but also would undermine our own precedents. 5 In all events, an unforced reading of 1985(3) affords no principled basis for distinguishing between public and private conspiracies. Griffin neither supports nor suggests the existence of such a distinction, and, at any rate, it is not the proper province of a federal court to rewrite a statute under the guise of interpretation. Thus, we decline the plaintiff's invitation to create by judicial fiat two classes of 1985(3) conspiracies along a public/private axis. So ends this phase of our inquiry. To the extent that we have not previously made the scope of the requirement explicit, we now hold that to state a claim under 1985(3) in respect to conspiracies involving public officials, private actors, or both, plaintiffs must allege that the conduct complained of resulted from an invidiously discriminatory classbased animus. 2. Cognizable Classes. The plaintiff next struggles