Court Opinion

ID: 9478651
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:54:01.816875+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:36.186047
License: Public Domain

STEPHEN F. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part, dissenting in part:
In 1978 George Washington University, acting through the Personnel Committee of its Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, refused to promote Professor Kyriakopoulos to full professor. For seven years thereafter, Kyriakopoulos *449pursued his grievance through the University’s internal procedures. The Faculty Senate Hearing and Grievance Committees heard the matter, then the University Board of Trustees, and finally the Personnel Committee considered it on remand in 1985. It again decided against promotion. Kyriakopoulos filed this diversity suit in 1986.
This court affirms the district court’s decision that the claims based directly on the 1978 denial must be dismissed under the District of Columbia’s three-year statute of limitations. The court finds that under District law the pendency of grievance proceedings after the 1978 denial did not toll the statute. Maj.Op. at 443. So far, I agree.
The court, however, treats as a new breach the Personnel Committee’s 1985 refusal to alter its 1978 decision. This solution, however appealing, wholly undermines the District’s rule that the pendency of grievance proceedings does not toll the statute.
A discrete body of case law has interpreted statutes of limitations in the context of employment decisions, particularly in the realm of university-faculty relations. See Maj.Op. at 442-43. In Delaware State College v. Ricks, 449 U.S. 250, 101 S.Ct. 498, 66 L.Ed.2d 431 (1980), a college professor alleged that his denial of tenure violated both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e et seq. (1981), and 42 U.S.C. § 1981 (1982). The Supreme Court held that the applicable statute of limitations began to run at the time the College made its decision to deny tenure, rejecting the professor’s argument that the pendency of grievance procedures tolled the running of the limitations period:
[Ejntertaining a grievance complaining of the tenure decision does not suggest that the earlier decision was in any respect tentative. The grievance procedure, by its nature, is a remedy for a prior decision, not an opportunity to influence that decision before it is made.
... The existence of careful procedures to assure fairness in the tenure decision should not obscure the principle that limitations periods normally commence when the employer’s decision is made.
449 U.S. at 261, 101 S.Ct. at 505-06.
The District of Columbia cases have taken the same view. See, e.g., Clark v. Scott, 329 A.2d 442, 445 (D.C.1974) (pursuit of permissive remedies does not toll statute). In Fitzgerald v. Seamans, 553 F.2d 220 (D.C.Cir.1977), this court, interpreting the D.C.Code’s three-year statute of limitations, offered an explanation for the rule: “[T]he mere failure to right a wrong and make plaintiff whole cannot be a continuing wrong which tolls the statute of limitations, for that is the purpose of any lawsuit and the exception would obliterate the rule.” Id. at 230. Cf. Press v. Howard University, 540 A.2d 733 (D.C.1988) (rejecting theory of continuing breach, but the grievance procedures available did not appear to address the claim on which plaintiff sought relief in court).
The panel reads these cases as rejecting any theory that the pendency of permissive grievance procedures tolls the statute and thus finds Kyriakopoulos’s claims concerning the 1978 decision to be barred. Although the rule is not self-evidently wise, and certainly sounds oddly in the ears of judges accustomed to dismissing the claims of litigants who have failed to exhaust their remedies, such appears to be District law.
But the majority negates the rule by instructing the district court to consider on remand the merits of the claims regarding the 1985 decision. As the flaws that plaintiff finds in the 1985 decision add nothing new to 1978 process, the situation is one in which the defendant has simply failed to right a wrong. See Fitzgerald, 553 F.2d at 230. To assert a valid and timely claim, Kyriakopoulos must allege that some new illegality, distinct from the mere failure to cure the 1978 decision, caused the University’s 1985 persistence in its original disposition.
Application of this principle will be easy in some cases. For example, Kyriakopou-los’s fourth count, alleging that the Board of Trustees violated University procedures *450when in 1984 it overrode the recommendation of the Hearing and Grievance Committees, see Maj. Op. at 443-44, alleges a distinct error which (if a wrong at all) would constitute a new breach.1
At the other end of the spectrum, if Kryiakopoulos had claimed that in 1978 the Personnel Committee denied his promotion because of improper insistence on refereed publications and then in 1985 did so for the same reason on remand, both claims would be time-barred. The same would of course be true if the identical illegality were committed by a second university body. Unless both allegations are considered to be untimely, every appeals panel that affirms the original decision will automatically create a new breach, thereby negating the rule articulated by Ricks, Fitzgerald and the other cases.
These hypothetical are easy to classify because the errors involved are either identical or clearly dissimilar. The more difficult cases arise when the allegations involve different degrees or manifestations of the same type of error. For example, Professor Kyriakopoulos alleges that one reason his merit was not properly assessed in both 1978 and 1985 is that the Personnel Committee was motivated by bias or bad faith. When might the claims concerning bias in the 1985 decision escape the bar of the statute of limitations? If the evidence indicated that a new professor joined the Personnel Committee between 1978 and 1985 and that she was biased against Kyr-iakopoulos, I can see no reason why her bias would not constitute a new wrong, on which Kyriakopoulos could prevail if he could prove that the new member’s presence determined the adverse outcome in 1985. Even an increase in the bias of one or more continuing committee members could create a new claim, so long as the plaintiff could show that it was the increase that caused the committee to persevere in its error.
Similarly, even where the two errors take the form of relying on “reasons unrelated to whether he actually merited promotion,” Maj.Op. at 445, the error in the later phase could start the statute running anew so long as whatever was novel in it brought about the continued rejection. If the Personnel Committee rejected Kyriakopoulos in 1978 because of undue insistence on refereed publications, but in 1985 straightened out that error and went on to reject him because of an excessive reliance on classroom evaluations, I would have no difficulty finding a claim originating in 1985.
On this analysis, which appears essential to preserve the District’s rule, Kyriakopou-los’s fifth and sixth causes of action are time-barred. These claims resemble the hypothetical of successive university determinations that make the same substantive error. In his complaint, Kyriakopoulos claims that in 1978 and in 1985 the relevant university authorities focused on improper criteria. Neither he nor the majority identifies any alleged error made in 1985 that is distinct from the 1978 flaws. On the contrary, the majority states that “[o]f especial concern [in the resolution of the fifth and sixth causes of action] is the trial court’s treatment of whether Kyriakopou-los in fact merited promotion,” Maj.Op. at 446, and its primary concern seems to be the plaintiff’s allegations of undue reliance on refereed publications, Maj.Op. at 447. These allegations are no different from those arising from the 1978 decision. See Second Amended Complaint at 4 (alleging that in 1978 the Personnel Committee “ignored expressly stated criteria for promotion in plaintiff’s case, such as that stating that a balance between teaching and research was desirable, while instead requiring that plaintiff meet ... higher levels of performance”); see also id. (defendant refused to promote plaintiff “for ... other reasons unrelated to the merits”); id. at 6 (defendant breached implied covenant of good faith by “failing to consider and grant plaintiff’s promotion on the merits”).
The majority suggests that Delaware State College v. Ricks supports its view. See Maj.Op. at 448. There the Court held that the statute started to run on the tenure denial, not the discharge a year later; the discrimination occurred at the tenure *451denial, and the discharge at the end of the next year was simply an ineluctable consequence. 449 U.S. at 257-58, 101 S.Ct. at 503-04. When the Court observes that for the statute to start anew with the discharge, “Ricks would have to allege and prove that the manner in which his employment terminated differed discriminatorily from the manner in which the College terminated other professors who had also been denied tenure,” 449 U.S. at 258, 101 S.Ct. at 504, it says only that for this event to restart the statute, it must involve a new discrimination, one not inherent in the original decision. That seems to fit my position exactly.2 The majority’s reading of the sentence wholly undercuts the Court’s clear statement that the pendency of grievance proceedings does not toll the statute. Id. at 261, 101 S.Ct. at 505.
The majority seems to posit a class of cases where some university body “merely declines [in the grievance procedure] to remedy [the initial] breach,” as opposed to instances where it “independently breaches” a provision of the contract. Maj.Op. at 448. It cites the action of the Board of Trustees here as an example. But of course here the Board made no substantive decision at all; it remanded to the Personnel Committee (and we all agree that that act, if a contract violation, would constitute a fresh breach).
What I find hard to conceive is a substantive failure to remedy that would not constitute a new breach under the majority’s view. Suppose that on remand here the Personnel Committee simply said, “We find no error in the initial decision.” Presumably that would represent an endorsement of the fact-finding and reasoning of the initial decision, and thus be infected with its errors. Suppose they were even more taciturn, and said only “No relief.” Perhaps that would qualify as falling short of an independent breach with respect to the substantive errors, although strictly as a logical matter it would seem to depend on the panel’s approval of the initial decider’s approach. But this is thin solace for the university; if the contract gave the employee a right to review by this university body, I strongly suspect that a court might find the silent treatment to be a breach of the university’s procedural obligations. Moreover, even when the review panel is under no legal obligation to explain its decision, it is likely to do so out of the natural and decent impulse to tell the loser why he lost. Thus, it seems to me virtually certain that the majority’s mode of analysis provides a method by which plaintiffs can circumvent the District’s application of its statute of limitations to grievance procedures in every case where those procedures are employed.

. I concur in the majority’s disposition of this count.

. I do not read the University’s brief as by any means accepting the majority’s view. Compare Maj.Op. at 448. The University’s argument that the fifth and sixth causes of action are "at most, a refusal to cure the 1978 breach, and not a separate breach of contract,” Brief for Appellee at 20, seems to me in context a contention that mere persistence in old error is not a new breach.
I do not see the relevance of the majority’s hypothetical on the application of the statute of limitations to successive libels made by university bodies in the course of a grievance procedure. See Maj.Op. at 448. In defamation suits each publication constitutes a new tort. See Rodney A. Smolla, Law of Defamation § 4.13[4] (1986). Here, the prevailing cases hold that the persistence of a review panel in the initial panel’s opinion does not constitute a new contract breach.