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

Heading: Vicarious Exhaustion of Administrative Remedies

Text: 7 The USIA argued to the district court on the latest go-around that class members should not be permitted to intervene as additional named plaintiffs because they had failed to exhaust their administrative remedies. 158 F.R.D. at 535. The district court applied this court's doctrine of vicarious exhaustion--that exhaustion of administrative remedies by one member of the class satisfies the requirement for all others with sufficiently similar grievances, see Foster v. Gueory, 655 F.2d 1319, 1322-23 (D.C.Cir.1981)--and therefore allowed the intervention. On this appeal, the USIA disputes the district court's application of the vicarious exhaustion doctrine, claiming among other things that the few administrative complaints actually filed were not precise enough to fulfill the purposes of the doctrine, such as putting the agency on notice and allowing for administrative resolution of the claims. 8 We do not reach the merits of defendant's arguments on this issue because of the defendant's failure to pursue it in its prior appeal. [W]here an argument could have been raised on an initial appeal, it is inappropriate to consider that argument on a second appeal following remand. Northwestern Indiana Tel. Co. v. FCC, 872 F.2d 465, 470 (D.C.Cir.1989). The rule serves judicial economy by forcing parties to raise issues whose resolution might spare the court and parties later rounds of remands and appeals. Crocker v. Piedmont Aviation, Inc., 49 F.3d 735, 740 (D.C.Cir.1995). 9 The USIA had ample opportunity to raise the exhaustion issue on its previous appeal when it challenged class certification. Its theory here depends simply on the absence of individual exhaustion and on the vagueness of the administrative complaints of those who did exhaust. As the vast majority of the members of the class have not exhausted their administrative remedies (and in fact the intervenors are and have always been members of the class), the filing of petitions for intervention as named plaintiffs did nothing to enhance defendant's ability to raise the issue of exhaustion by plaintiffs who in fact failed to exhaust their remedies personally. By arguing the exhaustion point at the appropriate (much earlier) juncture, the USIA could perhaps have undone certification at one stroke. Instead, the agency waited to raise this issue until this late date, almost two decades into litigation and after our second opinion in this case focusing almost exclusively on class certification. The omission is all the more striking because the issue had come up in the course of the litigation before with respect to one named plaintiff. See De Medina, 686 F.2d at 1012-13 (finding that the vicarious exhaustion doctrine of Foster applied to named plaintiff Kobylinski, whose claims were virtually identical to those of named plaintiff Martinez, who had exhausted). We therefore find no error in the district court's order permitting the intervention of additional named plaintiffs. 10 We note that plaintiffs did not raise this waiver problem. We have in some instances found such silence to be a waiver of a waiver, see, e.g., Belton v. WMATA, 20 F.3d 1197, 1202 (D.C.Cir.1994); Fox v. District of Columbia, 83 F.3d 1491, 1496 (D.C.Cir.1996), but we do not do so here. 3 We think it would be in only the most extraordinary case that a second-time appellant could escape the consequences of its earlier omission at the end of nearly twenty years of litigation.