Court Opinion

ID: 9476440
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:56:18.243625+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:19.518365
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I join in Parts I, II and III of the majority opinion but part company with it on Parts IV and V. These sections remand the case to another judge for Rule 11 determinations. Judge Holderman denied Canteen’s motion for Rule 11 sanctions. I feel sure that his well-informed but unem-broidered response to this motion is as solid and secure a basis for disposition of the sanctions question as will be the opinion of a new judge coming to the matter without prior exposure, to the merits. If Judge Holderman had imposed sanctions, we might well require more explanation.
The approach revealed in Parts IV and V of the majority opinion effectively transforms Rule 11 from a protector against frivolous litigation, a boon to the parties and the courts, into a fomentor of derivative litigation, a mire for unwary parties and overzealous courts. In addition, under this approach the judicial process becomes a task not unlike the grading of law school examinations. Presumably the submissions of the parties are to be marked on a scale of “A” through “F”. Anything falling on the far side of “C” merits not only loss of one’s case but loss of one’s shirt as well.
The majority finds the due process claim here to be objectively frivolous and “wacky” — apparently because the claim is partially based on “obscure cases,” and because it fails to cite, rather than strives to distinguish, certain other cases. I am not persuaded by Szabo-Digby’s claim but I would, at worst, rate it an “incomplete” rather than a solid “flunk.” The majority’s “wackiness” conclusion requires an analysis consuming five dense paragraphs and citing more than twenty cases — a possible indicator that the result is not so blindingly obvious as to bring it reasonably within the ambit of Rule 11. A similar indicator is the fact that one of the “obscure cases” on which this “frivolous” due process claim was based — Three Rivers Cablevision, Inc. v. City of Pittsburgh, 502 F.Supp. 1118 (W.D.Pa.1980) — has been explicitly approved by an Illinois court for its approach to due process. Northwest Disposal Co. v. Village of Fox Lake, 119 Ill.App.3d 546, 551, 75 Ill.Dec. 8, 12, 456 N.E.2d 691, 695 (1983) (“We recognize the very limited due process right for unsuccessful bidders as established under the rationale of Three Rivers.”).1
In addition, there are real problems with imposing Rule 11 sanctions for a pleading — as not “warranted by existing law or a good faith argument for the extension, modification, or reversal of existing law”— on the basis of the sophistication of the legal arguments presented to defend the pleading and the erudition displayed by the responsible counsel. Here both counsel are sophisticated. And Szabo-Digby has cited relevant state and federal authority to support its due process claim. But I sense that, in general, with the majority’s approach to what might be “objectively frivolous,” ingenious and sophisticated (read expensive) rhetoric can salvage almost any position and avoid sanctions. But beware counsel, whose research (or resources) is not unlimited or whose skills in argumentation fall short of the most finely honed.
Due process, unfortunately, is an area where creativity and frivolity sometimes threaten to merge; I would be more re*1086strained than my brethren in handing out sanctions for civil rights claims. For the chilling effect of today’s decision will reach as tellingly to the most meritorious such claim as to the least.
The remand for fact-finding on the race discrimination claim, a disposition that seems less supportable even than the due process critique, opens new vistas for peripheral litigation. Again Szabo-Digby may have losing arguments. But we now seem almost at the point of saying that the main question before the court is not “Are you right?” but “Are you sanctionable?” We are in danger of creating a whole new cottage industry of sanctions. I continue to believe that the 1983 amendment of Rule 11 was sound in concept, but it will surely defeat its own purpose if not applied with wisdom and restraint.2
I would be more inclined to accept the judgments of the district courts in these matters and not generally to require much explanation if sanctions are refused. The alternative is to pursue a nit-picking appellate review that will add more to our burdens than sanctions for “objectively frivolous” cases will take away.
I therefore respectfully dissent with respect to Parts IV and V.

. The majority mischaracterizes Szabo-Digby’s argument by selectively quoting its brief, see supra at 1081. Szabo-Digby merely summarized the holding in Three Rivers, adopted in Northwest Disposal, when it argued:
[Wjhere, as here, state law requires public contracts to be awarded to the lowest responsible bidder, and where a decision has been made to award such a contract, a bidder has an interest in not having the procedure, which regulates the enjoyment of the benefit sought, applied in an arbitrary or capricious manner.
Appellees’ Brief at 38 (emphasis supplied).

. The advisory committee that supported the 1983 amendment was much aware of the threat that derivative litigation poses to the goals of the amendment. The majority’s holding in section V appears to sculpt virtually every Rule 11 motion into the likeness of a summary judgment motion, perhaps even requiring that explicit findings of fact and conclusions of law accompany every disposition of a Rule 11 motion. This surely runs roughshod over the committee's warnings against collateral proceedings:
To assure that the efficiencies achieved through more effective operation of the pleading regimen will not be offset by the cost of satellite litigation over the imposition of sanctions, the court must to the extent possible limit the scope of sanction proceedings to the record. Thus, discovery should be conducted only by leave of the court, and then only in extraordinary circumstances.
Fed.R.Civ.P. 11 (Notes of Advisory Comm., 1983 Amendment) (emphasis supplied).