Opinion ID: 4509820
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Dr. Rivero’s Medical-Examination Claim

Text: Defendant does not contest that one of the ADA provisions incorporated into the Rehabilitation Act is 42 U.S.C. § 12112(d)(4)(A), which states: A covered entity shall not require a medical examination and shall not make inquiries of an employee as to whether such employee is an individual with a disability or as to the nature or severity of the disability, unless such examination or inquiry is shown to be job-related and consistent with business necessity. See Lee v. City of Columbus, Ohio, 636 F.3d 245, 252 (6th Cir. 2011) (This “limitation[ ] on the disclosure of medical information . . . [is] incorporated by reference into the Rehabilitation Act.”). The prohibitions in § 12112(d)(4) apply to all employees regardless of their disability status. See Roe v. Cheyenne Mountain Conference Resort, Inc., 124 F.3d 1221, 1229 (10th Cir. 1997) (“[T]he . . . challenge plaintiff has brought [for an unlawful medical inquiry under 42 U.S.C. § 12112(d)(4), see id. at 1226] does not require her to meet the statutory definition of a person with a disability.”). To establish an unlawful-examination-or-inquiry claim, a plaintiff must show only “(1) that he is an employee of the defendant-employer, and (2) that the defendant-employer required him to undergo a medical examination or made a disability-related inquiry of him.” Williams v. FedEx Corp. Servs., 849 F.3d 889, 901 (10th Cir. 2017). “[I]f the plaintiff makes the required showing, the employer may avoid liability by demonstrating that the medical examination or disability-related inquiry was job-related and consistent with business necessity.” Id. 6 Dr. Rivero claims that UNMH violated the Rehabilitation Act when it conditioned his future full-time employment on his being subjected to psychiatric examinations and treatment. The district court dismissed Dr. Rivero’s claim as untimely. It ruled that the limitations period for the claim was three years 3 and that the claim accrued (so that the limitations period began to run) when Dr. Rivero knew or should have known of facts establishing the elements of a prima facie case. It determined that the evidence was undisputed that Dr. Rivero knew of the terms of the Addendum to his employment contract by March 9, 2011, when he sent an email requesting additional time to decide whether to agree to the terms. The limitations period therefore expired in March 2014, well before Dr. Rivero filed suit in April 2016. Dr. Rivero does not dispute that the applicable limitations period is three years and that he was aware of the psychiatric-examination requirement in March 2011. 4 Nor does he dispute that by March 2011 he had sufficient evidence to establish a prima facie case on the elements of an unlawful-medical-inquiry claim set forth in Williams. Rather, what Dr. Rivero argues is that he had the burden to plead facts showing that there was no business-necessity justification for UNMH to require the psychiatric 3 The court followed our caselaw stating that the limitations period for Rehabilitation Act claims is determined by reference to the most closely analogous state law. See Rivero, 2019 WL 1085179 at  (citing Levy v. Kan. Dept. of Soc. and Rehab. Servs., 789 F.3d 1164, 1171–72 (10th Cir. 2015)). The court then used the three-year limitations period in New Mexico’s statute of limitations for personal-injury claims. See N.M. Stat. Ann. § 37-1-8 (West 2019). 4 He does not argue that the limitations period was tolled while his EEOC complaint was being considered by the agency. 7 examination and treatment, and therefore his claim did not accrue until he had completed his investigation into whether UNMH had such a justification. Because that investigation was not completed until early 2014, when he received access to his personnel files and “understood” that there was no business-necessity justification for the psychiatricexamination requirement, he asserts that the three-year limitations period did not expire before 2017. Aplt. Br. at 27. Our precedents foreclose this argument. As previously indicated, business necessity is an affirmative defense on which the employer has the burden of persuasion. See Williams, 849 F.3d at 901 (“[T]he employer may avoid liability by demonstrating that the medical examination or disability-related inquiry was job-related and consistent with business necessity.”); Taylor v. City of Shreveport, 798 F.3d 276, 286–87 (5th Cir. 2015) (“Business necessity is an affirmative defense, so it is generally inappropriate to dismiss a medical inquiry/examination claim at the [Fed. R. Civ. P.] 12(b)(6) stage on business necessity grounds.”); Lee, 636 F.3d at 252, 254 n.7 (referring to “defendant’s affirmative defense of business necessity” in claim under 42 U.S.C. § 12112(d)(4)); Conroy v. N.Y. State Dep’t of Corr. Servs., 333 F.3d 88, 97 (2nd Cir. 2003) (employer has burden of proving “the business necessity defense” in claim under § 12112(d)(4)(A)); see also Wetherbee v. Southern Co., 754 F.3d 901, 903 (11th Cir. 2014) (same regarding claim under § 12112(d)(3)). A plaintiff has no burden to anticipate an affirmative defense and plead facts negating it. See Fernandez v. Clean House, LLC, 883 F.3d 1296, 1299 (10th Cir. 2018) (“A plaintiff need not anticipate in the complaint an affirmative 8 defense that may be raised by the defendant; it is the defendant’s burden to plead an affirmative defense.”) Therefore, Dr. Rivero could file a proper claim for relief without investigating possible affirmative defenses. 5 Dr. Rivero contends that our decision in Williams is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s opinions in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009), and Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), which imposed heightened pleading standards on plaintiffs. But those opinions addressed only how a plaintiff must allege facts supporting the elements of the plaintiff’s cause of action, not what those elements are. In any event, Williams, which postdated Iqbal and Twombly, is binding precedent in this circuit, and we must follow it absent intervening statutory amendments or Supreme Court decisions. See In re Smith, 10 F.3d 723, 724 (10th Cir. 1993) (requiring panels to follow circuit precedent). 6 5 We decline to decide whether Fed. R. Civ. P. 11 could be the basis for tolling the limitations period while the employee investigates whether he has a good-faith basis to believe that his claim would not be frivolous in light of a business justification for an allegedly unlawful examination. Dr. Rivero did not make this argument in his opening brief or his reply brief and raised the issue for the first time at oral argument. See Lenox MacLaren Surgical Corp. v. Medtronic, Inc., 762 F.3d 1114, 1122 n.7 (10th Cir. 2014) (declining to consider argument made during oral argument when it had not been adequately briefed). 6 We disagree with Dr. Rivero’s contention that Williams is inconsistent with our earlier decision in Baker v. Board of Regents of the State of Kansas, 991 F.2d 628 (10th Cir. 1993). Although Baker does contain a stray statement (which was unnecessary for the holding and therefore dictum) that could be read to mean that the cause of action in a reverse-discrimination case does not accrue until the plaintiff knows of the reason for the injurious action, it also states that the cause of action accrues when the plaintiff knows or has reason to know of the injury. See id. at 632. Regardless, in that case the reason for the injurious action was at least relevant to the elements of the plaintiff’s reverse- 9 We therefore affirm the district court’s grant of summary judgment against Dr. Rivero on this claim because it is time barred.