Court Opinion

ID: 9577620
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:36:32.162195+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:20:56.649848
License: Public Domain

CARTER, Justice
(concurring in part; dissenting in part).
I concur in the opinion of the court as to the individual defendants but not as to the Iowa Department of Transportation, which is the alter ego of the State of Iowa.
The opinion of the court assumes that the doctrine envisioned in section 26(l)(c) of the Restatement (Second) of Judgments (1982) is limited to situations in which the first court was without jurisdiction to entertain the claim at issue or exercised a discretion not to consider that claim on the merits. The section 26(l)(e) exception to the “bar” rule is not so narrowly written. It applies in situations in which, as in the present case, the plaintiff in the first court “was unable ... to seek a certain remedy” because of “restrictions on [the first court’s] authority to entertain multiple remedies or forms of relief in a single action.” Clearly, the federal court in the prior action was unable to entertain the claim for money damages because of the bar imposed by the Eleventh Amendment.
I do not perceive the relevance of the majority’s discussion with respect to the State’s ability to waive the Eleventh Amendment defense. Clearly, it was not waived in the present case and stood as a restriction on the federal court’s ability to award money damages at the time that claim was withdrawn. I also fail to see the relevance of the fact that the plaintiff could have brought the entire action in the state court in the first instance. The doctrine of claim preclusion is almost always asserted in a court that would have had jurisdiction to hear the ease in the first instance if it had been brought in that court instead of another court. I would hold that the claim for money damages is not barred by any theory of claim preclusion.