Opinion ID: 1346280
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Material Alteration of the Legal Relationship

Text: Defendants' first argument, that it began serving Halal meat voluntarily and that the legal relationship between the parties was unaltered, requires little discussion. At several points during the litigation, Defendants acknowledged that they did not serve Halal meat to Muslim inmates as often as they served Kosher meat to Jewish inmates and did not want to do so. Indeed, their first settlement offer proposed that they serve Halal meat once a week, and the County's lawyer criticized Plaintiffs' apparent position that they would not accept any form of settlement unless [the County] give[s] them Halal meat the same number of times that the Jewish inmates get kosher meat. As the Order of Settlement explicitly states, the County only changed its conduct in contemplation of settling the ... lawsuits. There is thus no merit to the County's contention that it changed its practices on its own and independent of the lawsuit. More importantly, the County is now legally incapable of acting as it did before the entry of the Order. The Order of Settlement specifically directs, inter alia, that the County shall continue to provide Halal meat to Muslim inmates who request a Halal diet as often as it provides Kosher meat to Jewish inmates who request a Kosher diet, and the County's actions are now governed by a ten-part procedure that is an express condition of the dismissal of the lawsuits. Assuming the unlikely, that Defendants' constitutional arguments were correct and the County was free to serve Halal meat to Muslim inmates less often than it served Kosher meat to Jewish inmates, it cannot now do so without violating a Court order. See Kokkonen v. Guardian Life Ins. Co. of Am., 511 U.S. 375, 381, 114 S.Ct. 1673, 128 L.Ed.2d 391 (1994) (noting that where an order of dismissal incorporat[es] the terms of [a] settlement agreement ..., a breach of the agreement would be a violation of the order). Whether the County's initial decision to serve Halal meat at the appropriate frequency was voluntary or not is thus inconsequential, as it can no longer freely reverse that decision.