Opinion ID: 3065723
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: State and federal civil rights statutes

Text: [8] In addition to the fees sought under § 12-341.01, defendants also sought fees under three civil rights statutes— Arizona Revised Statute § 41-1481(J) and 42 U.S.C. §§ 1988 and 2000e-5(k). Under Arizona Revised Statute § 41-1481(J), “the court may allow the prevailing party . . . a reasonable attorney’s fee”; under 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b), “[i]n any action or proceeding to enforce a provision of [42 U.S.C. § 1983], the court, in its discretion, may allow the prevailing party, other than the United States, a reasonable attorney’s fee as part of the costs”; and under 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-5(k), “[i]n any action or proceeding under [Title VII of the Civil Rights Act] the court, in its discretion, may allow the prevailing party, other than the [Equal Employment Opportunity] Commission or the United States, a reasonable attorney’s fee.” Fee awards to prevailing defendants under all three of these statutes are governed by the same standard: the court may award attorney’s fees only if it finds that “the plaintiff’s action was frivolous, unreasonable, or without foundation, even though not brought in subjective bad faith.” Christiansburg Garment Co, 434 U.S. at 421; Hughes v. Rowe, 449 U.S. 5, 14 (1980); Sees, 714 P.2d at 862. “In determining whether this standard has been met, a district court must assess the claim at the time the complaint was filed, and must avoid post hoc reasoning by concluding that, because a plaintiff did not ultimately prevail, his action must have been unreasonable or without foundahe did not make his arguments regarding the due process claim explicitly or clearly. In any case, “where an issue is purely legal, and the other party would not be prejudiced, we can consider an issue not raised below.” Engquist v. Oregon, Dept. of Agriculture, 478 F.3d 985, 996 n.5 (9th Cir. 2007). The question of whether the due process claim arises from contract is a “purely legal issue, the injection of which would not have caused the parties to develop new or different facts,” International Ass’n of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, AFL-CIO v. Aloha Airlines, Inc., 790 F.2d 727, 732 -733 (9th Cir. 1986), and defendants do not contend that they would be prejudiced by our considering it. 1104 HARRIS v. MARICOPA COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT tion.” Tutor-Saliba Corp., 452 F.3d at 1060 (quotation marks omitted). The district court awarded fees for the following claims on the basis that they were frivolous, unreasonable, or without foundation: hostile work environment, false light/invasion of privacy, wrongful termination, and negligent or intentional infliction of emotional distress.5 For each of these claims, Harris challenges the district court’s determination that fees were appropriate.6 Hostile work environment based on gender and race Although Harris made a single claim alleging that he had been subjected to a hostile work environment on account of his race and gender together, the district court treated this claim as two separate claims, one concerning race, one concerning gender. It found that Harris’s gender-based subclaim was frivolous because it was filed more than 300 days — the 5 It also found that Harris had asserted a frivolous disparate impact claim, because Harris failed to identify an outwardly neutral practice with a disparate impact on a protected class. See Katz v. Regents of the Univ. of Cal., 229 F.3d 831, 835 (9th Cir. 2000). Harris’s Amended Complaint, however, includes no disparate impact claim; it appears that he did not properly plead the elements of the claim because he did not make the claim in the first place. It is, however, not necessary to explore why the district court identified and passed judgment on a claim absent from the Complaint, as in the end it awarded no fees with respect to it. 6 The district court found that the defendants could seek attorneys fees for Harris’s pendant state law claims (in addition to his federal civil rights claims) under the civil rights fee statutes because these state law claims arose from a common nucleus of operative fact with a substantial federal claim. In order to reach that conclusion, the district court relied on a case from the Seventh Circuit, Munson v. Milwaukee Bd. of Sch. Dirs., 969 F.2d 266, 271-72 (7th Cir. 1992). Whether fees are available to defendants for such claims under § 1988 and the other civil rights fee statutes is an open question in our Circuit. We do not address it here because Harris failed to challenge the district court’s decision on this point. Accordingly, our discussion of these claims should not be read as an endorsement of Munson’s reasoning or of the district court’s conclusion. HARRIS v. MARICOPA COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT 1105 time limit imposed by Title VII — after the last act of discrimination alleged by Harris that the district court categorized as gender-based. It did not determine that his race-based subclaim was untimely —it apparently categorized acts within the 300 day window as race based — but that instead it was frivolous because he did not allege severe and pervasive conduct based on his race, as would be required for relief under Title VII. [9] The district court erred in dividing the claim in two, and then treating half of it as frivolous because of Title VII’s statute of limitations and half as frivolous for a substantive reason. Harris claimed that his work environment was hostile because of discrimination against him as a black male, not that he was discriminated against as a male and then suffered separate discrimination as a black person. It is perfectly plausible that gender and race could together give rise to discrimination in the manner Harris alleged: he claimed that false sexual harassment allegations were made against him and that action was taken on these false charges because of the combination of his race and gender. Prejudiced individuals have long promulgated a pernicious image of black men as sexual predators; a view that they do not hold with respect to men of other racial backgrounds or with respect to black women. See, e.g., Powell v. State of Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932). Courts, moreover, have properly shown solicitude for claims based on the intersection of different categories of discrimination. See Jefferies v. Harris Co. Community Action Ass’n, 615 F.2d 1025, 1032 (5th Cir. 1980) (“discrimination against black females [could] exist even in the absence of discrimination against black men or white women”). [10] Nevertheless, the district court did not err in determining that the hostile work environment claim as a whole was frivolous. A hostile work environment claim requires inter alia “that the conduct was sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim’s employment and create an abusive working environment.” Pavon v. Swift Trans. Co., 1106 HARRIS v. MARICOPA COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT Inc., 192 F.3d 902, 908 (9th Cir. 1999). The discriminatory conduct that Harris alleged fell short of meeting this condition, and Harris himself did not allege that the condition was met. While Harris’s allegations of discrimination were sufficient to make out a prima facie case of disparate treatment under Title VII, they were obviously insufficient for a hostile work environment claim. [11] Although the court may not have erred in determining that the claim was frivolous, it nonetheless erred in awarding substantial fees to defendants on this claim. Almost every time entry in defendants’ fee petition for work related to the hostile work environment claim was also listed as related to some or all of Harris’s nonfrivolous discrimination claims. As we have already explained, in a civil rights action with multiple claims, only some of which are groundless, a defendant is entitled only to those fees attributable exclusively to defending against plaintiff’s frivolous claims. If the work is performed in whole or in part in connection with defending against any of plaintiff’s claims for which fees may not be awarded, such work may not be included in calculating a fee award. Accordingly, the fees properly attributable to this claim, if any, would be quite minimal. False Light/Invasion of Privacy [12] The district court found Harris’s false light/invasion of privacy claim frivolous because as a “limited purpose public figure [Harris] had no privacy interest in the allegations against him.” A person employed by the government is only a “public official” with limited privacy interests when he holds a position that “has such apparent importance that the public has an independent interest” in his performance, “beyond the general public interest in the . . . performance of all government employees.” Rosenblatt v. Baer, 383 U.S. 75, 86 (1966). Under Arizona law, such a public official cannot sue for false light invasion of privacy if the publication about which he complains relates to his performance of his public HARRIS v. MARICOPA COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT 1107 duties. Godbehere v. Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., 162 Ariz. 335, 343 (Ariz., 1989). [13] The district court found that it was obvious that Harris was a public official of the relevant sort, as opposed to an ordinary government employee. Its only support for this conclusion, however, was a set of cases concerning law enforcement officers, who are presumptively public officials. See id. (“Police and other law enforcement personnel are almost always classified as public officials.”). Such cases are an insufficient basis on which to conclude that the issue raised by Harris — whether a hearing officer or similar low level judicial officer is so important a public employee that the public’s interest in him is “beyond the general public interest in the . . . performance of all government employees” — has been answered “clearly by . . . precedent,” as the district court was required to do before deeming the false light claim in this case frivolous. See Gibson, 561 F.3d at 929. Even in cases that do not involve civil rights, we have been extremely hesitant to find claims meritless; the bar is higher still when considering the claims of a plaintiff seeking vindication of his civil rights. See Taylor AG Indus. v. Pure Gro, 54 F.3d 555, 563 (9th Cir. 1995) (finding that a claim was not “wholly without merit” despite negative cases from seven other circuits and the Supreme Court because no case in this circuit had so held); see also Hughes v. Rowe, 449 U.S. 5, 16 & n.13 (1980) (the fact that a petitioner’s claims, even where they failed to state a claim on which relief could be granted, warranted the “detailed” consideration of a seven page district court opinion indicated that they were not frivolous). Harris’s false light claim did not in any way approach the level of futility required to treat its outcome as obvious and the claim as being without merit; instead, it presented a question that, so far as we are aware, has not been previously answered by any court. Rather than being frivolous, it performed the salutary function of giving a court the opportunity to address a previously unanswered question. 1108 HARRIS v. MARICOPA COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT Wrongful termination [14] To prevail on a wrongful termination claim under Arizona law, a plaintiff must demonstrate that an employment relationship was terminated in violation of a state statute that does not provide its own remedy for statutory violations. See Ariz. Rev. Stat. § 23-1501(3)(b); Taylor v. Graham County Chamber of Commerce, 33 P.3d 518, 521-26 (Ariz. Ct. App. 2001). Harris identified as the only bases for his wrongful termination claim a federal statute and an Arizona statute that provides it own remedy for a statutory violation. Because the result of such a patently inadequate claim is obvious, the district court did not err by determining that it was frivolous. See Gibson, 561 F.3d at 929. Of course, the fees properly attributable to this claim, which placed on defendants only the burden of examining the basic legal requirements for such a claim, which are set forth on the face of the statute, would unquestionably be quite small. Negligent or intentional infliction of emotional distress [15] The district court relied on an erroneous legal standard to reach its determination that Harris’s negligent infliction of emotional distress claim was frivolous. Arizona law requires that emotional distress “result[ ] in illness or bodily harm” in order to recover for negligent infliction of emotional distress. Keck v. Jackson, 593 P.2d 668, 669 (Ariz. 1979). According to the district court, Harris’s claim was frivolous because he failed to allege in his complaint that he had suffered any physical injury; instead he alleged only that he had suffered “severe emotional distress.” “Bodily harm,” however, is a broader concept under Arizona law than might be suggested by the common usage of the term. In particular, it comprehends “substantial, long-term emotional disturbances” unaccompanied by any physical injury, see Monaco v. HealthPartners of Southern Arizona, 196 Ariz. 299, 303 (Ariz.App. Div. 2 1999). Accordingly, Harris’s invocation of “severe HARRIS v. MARICOPA COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT 1109 emotional distress” in his complaint appears sufficient as a matter of pleading. [16] This sufficiency is, perhaps, reflected in the fact that defendants did not seek judgment on the pleadings as to this claim. On that point, we note that it was unreasonable for the defendants to seek, and for the district court to grant, substantial attorney’s fees on the ground that Harris failed to plead a required element of his claim when defendants failed to challenge the pleading as insufficient at an earlier point in the proceedings. [17] The district court made a different but related error with respect to Harris’s intentional infliction of emotional distress claim. The district court found this claim to be frivolous because “Plaintiff allege[d] in his Amended Complaint that he was falsely accused of sexual harassment, and that such allegations tarnished his reputation,” and it was clear from the complaint that “this conduct was not sufficient to bring an IIED claim,” which requires “extreme and outrageous” conduct by the defendants. Four years earlier, however, when deciding whether to grant the defendants judgment on the pleadings, the district court said of exactly the same claim, “Plaintiffs’ allegations regarding Defendants’ conduct, if true, may suffice for extreme and outrageous conduct.” In Christianburg, the Supreme Court cautioned that district courts must “resist the understandable temptation to engage in post hoc reasoning by concluding that, because a plaintiff did not ultimately prevail, his action must have been unreasonable or without foundation.” Christiansburg, 434 U.S. at 421-22. Here, the district court appears to have succumbed to the very understandable temptation of which the Supreme Court warned. The fee award as to this claim cannot stand on the ground asserted by the district court.