Opinion ID: 721440
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Hartman's Individual Claims

Text: 11 We do find one aspect of defendant's arguments about lack of vicarious exhaustion to be not waived--and persuasive: that Hartman herself is out of the case because the district court had earlier found that she was not qualified for the job she sought. The only personnel action that Hartman claimed had injured her was rejection of her application for a job on Horizons Magazine, a USIA publication. In its 1979 opinion rejecting class certification, the district court noted that [b]oth Ms. Dorothy Crook, then Senior Editor of Economic Impact, another Agency publication, and Mr. Robert Korengold, then Editor of Horizons Magazine, testified that Ms. Hartman could not have been seriously considered for the position as she did not possess sufficient professional journalism experience. 21 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. at 80. The court credited this testimony, writing: The Court conclusively accepts the testimony of Ms. Crook and Mr. Korengold on this matter. Id. (emphasis added). 12 That conclusion lay fallow in the record until the most recent remand, when the trial court's apparent change of mind surfaced accidentally. The government pointed out the prior conclusive finding against Ms. Hartman in connection with the analysis of typicality (for certification purposes), 158 F.R.D. at 545, only to be told by the district court: [T]his Court neither heard nor made a final determination on the merits of Ms. Hartman's individual claim. Ms. Hartman's claim, like those of every other class member who applied for a civil service position, is subject to an individual Teamsters hearing before the Special Master. Id. at 546. 13 We do not understand in what sense the district court can mean that its prior conclusive[ ] finding was non-final. Although not the subject of a separate judgment under Rule 54 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, it was a conclusive ruling that was embraced by the final judgment that was the subject of the first appeal, decided in 1982. (And our decision on the first appeal did not overturn that specific finding.) In an apparent effort to suggest an exception to the application of law of the case to the issue, the district court observed that plaintiffs cited the affidavit of a USIA Personnel Management Specialist saying that he thought Hartman was qualified for a GS-11 or -12 position in editorial-type work. Id. at 545-46 n. 16. (The Horizons Magazine job was the equivalent of GS-11 or -12.) But this was among the evidence the trial court considered in arriving at its earlier decision, and so does not fit under the exception for new evidence. In any event the personnel specialist was not addressing specific qualifications for the Horizons Magazine job. Although plaintiffs suggest no other reason why the finding against Hartman is not in fact conclusive under law of the case, in truth the defendant raised the issue only rather obliquely; we remand the case in light of the possibility that there is some overlooked exception to law of the case that might permit revival of her individual claim.