Court Opinion

ID: 9455001
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:06:13.478079+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:24.782197
License: Public Domain

GODBOLD, Circuit Judge
(specially concurring):
I concur in the reversal. As I understand it, we are telling the District Court that it defined the class too narrowly and that it must extend the limits outward. We are not, at the appellate level, attempting to stake out precise limits of an appropriate class. That can be done only when there are more precise pleadings, enabling the District Court to equate and balance what the appellant claims are the limits of the class against the tests of adequate representation, protection of the interests of the class, and manageability of the lawsuit.
The burden of telling the District Court enough that it can intelligibly proceed is on the complaining party in the first instance, not upon the court to do so by conducting hearings on adequacy of representation, or upon the defendant to flush out the claims by discovery. The status of the Title VII complainant as a private attorney general does not entitle him to proceed with all cards held to his chest or with no cards at all. The class action is a useful tool or device whose capacities are wide but not without limits.
The District Court was understandably in doubt as to just what class the appellant purported to represent. What is now obvious in this Court is that appel*1126lant hopes — and plans — to represent a class as broad as his ingenuity and syntax will allow, subject to whatever boundaries are court-established. The only specific allegations concern appellant’s discharge from his position as “stripper,” and the failure to promote Negro dock workers to city drivers, both occurring at appellee’s Atlanta terminal. Georgia Highway is an interstate motor freight carrier operating in three states, with its principal office and largest terminal in Atlanta, where it allegedly employs over 600 persons. Its total employment is alleged to be more than 1,100 persons. According to the National Motor Carriers’ Directory, it has 32 terminals.
Appellant alleges that appellee does not employ Negroes in administrative offices, but whether in Atlanta, elsewhere, or systemwide is not stated. There is an allegation, about as general as language can be made, that the appellee “pursues a policy and condones discrimination or segregation on the basis of race or color.” Whether this refers to hiring, promotion, conditions of employment, or use of facilities, all concerned are left to guess. No defendant with a multiplant operation, and employees (some mobile and some fixed) scattered over several states and performing differing duties under presumably differing supervisors, can prepare a defense to this sort of charge. In the instant case over-the-road drivers, who, obviously do not work at the Atlanta terminal, are mentioned for the first time in the prayer for relief. Likewise the prayer asks for an end to unidentified discrimination in the “use of company maintained facilities.”
The pleadings structure no class by defined acts, by time, by persons, by plant, by department, by supervisor, or by any other means. The appellant has done no more than name the preserve on which he intends to hunt. Over-technical limitation of classes by the district courts will drain the life out of Title VII, as will unduly narrow scope of relief once discriminatory acts are found. But without reasonable specificity the court cannot define the class, cannot determine whether the representation is adequate, and the employer does not know how to defend. And, what may be most significant, an over-broad framing of the class may be so unfair to the absent members as to approach, if not amount to, deprivation of due process. Envision the hypothetical attorney with a single client, filing a class action to halt all racial discrimination in all the numerous plants and facilities of one of America’s mammoth corporations. One act, or a few acts, at one or a few places, can be charged to be part of a practice or policy quickening an injunction against all racial discrimination by the employer at all places. It is tidy, convenient for the courts fearing a flood of Title VII cases, and dandy for the employees if their champion wins. But what of the catastrophic consequences if the plaintiff loses and carries the class down with him, or proves only such limited facts that no practice or policy can be found, leaving him afloat but sinking the class ?
In Oatis v. Crown Zellerbaeh, 398 F. 2d 496 (1968), a single-plant case, plaintiff Hill claimed discrimination in several forms, one being the use of segregated locker rooms. This court allowed Oatis, Johnson and Young to appear as co-plaintiffs because each was employed in a separate and different department of the plant than Hill, but we held these co-plaintiffs “must proceed, however, within the periphery of the issues which Hill could assert,” and that if necessary each co-plaintiff could represent a subclass of persons in his department. Oatis represents a rational effort to structure classes and sub-classes based on the claims made as read against the factual context of the lawsuit. Jenkins v. United Gas Corporation, 400 F.2d 28 (1968) is not to the contrary. That case held that the plaintiff’s acceptance of a promotion, after he filed a complaint charging specific racial discrimination in promotion and racial discrimination in general did not render the suit moot as to the class. The last paragraph of the opinion recognizes, as we do and as *1127Oatis did, the power and duty to delineate rational classes and sub-classes.
One risk in the Title VII case is the normal reaction of the trial judge to shrink from holding that the single plaintiff, who has sufficient interest and motivation to sue, and his counsel, who has diligence to pursue, do not adequately represent the class, thereby implying possible lack of confidence in them. An additional risk is that of collusive suit at the indirect and undisclosed behest Of the employer, giving him the possibility of a whitewash of systemwide employment practices by a judicial inquiry of narrow scope in a forum far distant from numerous employees who may never have heard of the litigation, or, if they have heard, not in such manner as to impel them to grasp hold of the problem and make decisions about it.
Some of the difficulty may be sifted out by findings of the trial court at or during the trial that the plaintiff adequately represents the class. But this issue itself may be determined in the absence of 99.9% of those affected, who have had no notice or service of process or right to be heard and who may feel that the plaintiff in the particular case (or his counsel, or both) is the last person they want representing them.1
The broad brush approach of some of the Title VII cases is in sharp contrast to the diligence with which in other areas we carefully protect those whose rights may be affected by litigation. If this were an individual cross-action against an employee at one of appellee’s remote terminals we would turn intellectual handsprings over questions of notice and process to him and opportunity to protect his interests — such issues as whether the marshal dropped the notice at the door or handed it to the child at the front gate. But when the problem is multiplied many-fold, counsel, and at times the courts, are moving blithely ahead tacitly assuming all will be well for surely the plaintiff will win and manna will fall on all members of the class. It is not quite that easy.

. Rule 23(b) (2) does not require notice.