Opinion ID: 186146
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Claim II issues

Text: We also affirm the district court’s decision to grant American summary judgment on Beato Cruz’s individual damages claim and to deny his motion to certify the Claim II class. As to the summary-judgment issue, the district court concluded that Cruz’s individual damages claim was barred by the release Cruz signed in exchange for American’s $634.90 pay18 ment to him. Cruz challenges this ruling on appeal, claiming that the release is voidable because American, in its letter accompanying that payment, mistakenly represented the extent of its liability to Cruz under the Warsaw Convention. Cruz also appears to argue in his reply brief that the district court erroneously declined to address whether the Claim II class should have been certified given that it granted American summary judgment on the representative plaintiffs’ individual claims. We reject both challenges.
The parties disagree on the law applicable to the issue of the validity of the release. Cruz argues that federal common law applies; American says, and the district court agreed, that state law applies. In any event, American continues, Cruz’s release is valid regardless whether state law or federal common law applies. We agree with American that there is no conflict of law for this Court to resolve. The parties have identified only three possible sources of law: Maryland, Virginia, and federal common law. Cruz argues that the federal common law rule of decision to apply is the rule of the Second Restatement of Contracts. That rule, as Cruz quotes approvingly in his brief, is that ‘‘[a]n agreement is voidable’’ on grounds of mutual mistake ‘‘where both parties were mistaken as to a basic assumption of the agreement which has a material effect on the exchange of performances.’’ Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 152. In like fashion, Cruz relies on the Second Restatement’s unilateral misrepresentation rule. That rule, as stated in his brief, is that the release is voidable if Cruz’s manifestation of assent was induced by a material misrepresentation by American that ‘‘substantially contributed’’ to Cruz’s decision to sign the release. Id. §§ 164, 167. In American’s view, under the law of Virginia and Maryland, Cruz may rescind the agreement on the ground of mistake if he agreed to it with a mistaken belief concerning a fact of significance. As for misrepresentation, American’s understanding of the law of Virginia and Maryland is that 19 Cruz may rescind the agreement if he reasonably relied on American’s material misrepresentation. The standards advocated by the parties do not conflict in any respect relevant to our resolution of this appeal. While the standards are not linguistically identical, all place the burden on Cruz to make out this defense to enforcing the release. The only difference is that the mutual mistake standard labels whether Cruz relied on the misrepresentation in terms of whether the mistake had a ‘‘material effect on the exchange of performances’’ or whether the mistaken belief concerned a ‘‘fact of significance,’’ rather than in terms of his ‘‘reliance’’ on the misrepresentation. These formulations all go to whether the misrepresentation or mutual mistake was important to Cruz in his decision to accept the release. Therefore, the distinctions among them, in our view, make no substantive difference, at least in this case, and so we need not make a choice of law. Turning to the merits, Cruz has shown no triable issue of fact as to whether he relied on American’s mistaken misrepresentation. To review: American’s letter that accompanied its $634.90 check to Cruz understated the limit of its Warsaw Convention liability by $272.10. It is true, as Cruz points out, that this was indeed a misrepresentation or mistake; but Cruz has not established a triable issue of fact on the essential element of Cruz’s reliance on this misrepresentation or mistake. Uncontradicted evidence in the summary-judgment record establishes that this is not a triable issue. Cruz testified that, at the time he signed the release, he believed that the release would not prevent him from recovering even more money from American. That belief demonstrates that he did not rely on American’s representations about the state of the law of Warsaw Convention liability. If Cruz, in accepting the release, had relied on American’s representation about the limit of its liability, he would not have believed that he could, in his words, recover an ‘‘additional amount.’’ Rather, he would have thought that American’s payment fully discharged its payment obligation. That is because American paid him 20 exactly what it represented it owed him. The fact that he thought he was owed more shows that he did not believe that representation, i.e., American’s view of the law. Therefore, Cruz’s deposition testimony, together with the fact that he was represented by his current lawyer at the time, proves that he accepted a totally different measure, one that did not depend on deemed weight. This evidence shows that at the time – no doubt influenced by advice from his lawyer in the pending litigation against American – Cruz believed that he could recover the full $3,890 value of his bag regardless of its weight, deemed or otherwise. That is clear enough from positions his lawyer later took on his behalf, and given the summary-judgment record the parties compiled, it is not reasonable to read the record any other way. Because Cruz did not accept deemed weight as a method for calculating liability at all, he could not have cared that American got the deemed weight wrong. Cruz’s belief shows that he accepted the release for totally different reasons, ones that had nothing to do with American’s mistaken representation as to deemed weight, and thus as to the limit of its liability under the Warsaw Convention. Cruz’s failure to produce any evidence creating a genuine issue as to this fact entitles American to summary judgment on the question of this defense to enforcing the release. We recognize, as Cruz takes pains to highlight in his brief, that the mistake at issue in this case is different from the one in Curtin v. United Airlines, Inc., 275 F.3d 88 (D.C. Cir. 2001), but this distinction does not require a different result in this case. In Curtin, United Airlines had offered to settle the lost-baggage claims of certain of its passengers and, in connection with these offers, had represented to these passengers that its liability was limited to $635 under the Warsaw Convention. Id. at 89–90. This Court held that this representation did not allow the passengers who had settled their claims with United to rescind the releases on the ground of mutual or unilateral mistake. Id. at 96–97. American made the representations before Cruz was decided, the Court reasoned, when the law regarding the limit of American’s liability under the Warsaw Convention was unsettled. Be21 cause that representation was reasonable in light of the unsettled state of the law at the time the parties agreed to the release, American made no ‘‘mistake,’’ the Court held. Id. Cruz is right that, unlike Curtin, American, in light of its understanding of the law at the time of the release, made a mistake. Given American’s belief that the Warsaw Convention liability limits applied, and its view of how to calculate those liability limits, American mistakenly stated the limit of that liability. We rest our holding not on the fact that American made no ‘‘mistake,’’ but rather on the fact that that Cruz has not established genuine issues of material fact about whether he relied on that mistake, given that he did not think American’s liability was limited at all.
Cruz does not argue in his opening brief that the district court mistakenly declined to address whether the Claim II class should be certified given that it dismissed only the representative plaintiffs’ claims on the merits at the summary judgment stage, rather than all of the claims of the Claim II putative class. Although we may discern a hint of such an argument after a close reading of plaintiffs’ reply brief (albeit not a hint supported by both citations to authority and argument, as is required by Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 28(a)(9)), plaintiff was required to present, argue, and support this claim in his opening brief for us to consider it. See, e.g., Nat’l Lime Ass’n v. EPA, 233 F.3d 625, 633 (D.C. Cir. 2000). We are not ‘‘self-directed boards of legal inquiry and research, but essentially TTT arbiters of legal questions presented and argued by the parties.’’ Carducci v. Regan, 714 F.2d 171, 177 (D.C. Cir. 1983). We therefore do not consider whether the district court correctly declined to address the propriety of certifying the Claim II class after it dismissed the individual plaintiff’s damages claims. Although we do not decide the point, we note that many of the reasons the district court gave in declining to certify the Claim I class equally apply to whether the Claim II class should have been certified. Once the 22 injunctive claims are gone, the issues in both Claim I and Claim II are individualized.