Court Opinion

ID: 9476032
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:46:25.499116+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:06.147442
License: Public Domain

RIPPLE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting in part.
I respectfully dissent from my brothers’ decision not to vacate the judgment with respect to the Title VII claim.
As my brothers point out, Mr. Hussein first mentions this matter in his reply brief. Under usual circumstances, this court does not entertain an argument first made in a reply brief. Shlay v. Montgomery, 802 F.2d 918, 922 n. 2 (7th Cir.1986). This is not, however, the usual case. Mr. Hussein’s request that we vacate the Title VII claim is not grounded in any intrinsic error in the adjudication of that claim; it is derivative of his argument that the section 1981 claim was erroneously dismissed. In his opening brief, Mr. Hussein set forth his sole assertion of error in the proceedings below — the dismissal of the section 1981 claim. Oshkosh Truck countered that the error could be rectified by using the Title VII judgment, through collateral estoppel, to cure any error with respect to the section 1981 claim. Under these circumstances, Mr. Hussein was quite within his rights to remind us in his reply brief that, if we agreed with his assertion that the section 1981 claim was improperly dismissed, we could not use the Title VII judgment as proposed by Oshkosh Truck. Rather, we had to fashion a remedy which would enforce fully the right to jury trial which he had been denied by the dismissal of his section 1981 claim.
Fashioning such a remedy — a duty which we would have even if Mr. Hussein had not reminded us of it — requires vacation of the Title VII claim. Had the section 1981 count not been erroneously dismissed, the jury’s determination on that count could not have been disregarded when the court considered whether to grant equitable relief under Title VII. It is possible, on remand, that the jury may find that Oshkosh Truck discriminated against Mr. Hussein on the basis of his race. Such a determination would constitute not only a violation of section 1981 but also a violation of Title VII.1 Thus, the erroneous dismissal of his section 1981 claim and the concomitant denial of a jury determination of the merits would, in the words of then-Judge Scalia in Bouchet v. National Urban *361League, Inc., 730 F.2d 799, 803 (D.C.Cir.1984), “infect the disposition of [his] Title VII claim as well, since most if not all of its elements would have been presented to the wrong trier of fact.” See also Calnetics Corp. v. Volkswagen of America, Inc., 532 F.2d 674, 690 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 940, 97 S.Ct. 355, 50 L.Ed.2d 309 (1976); Heyman v. Kline, 456 F.2d 123, 131 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 409 U.S. 847, 93 S.Ct. 53, 34 L.Ed.2d 88 (1972).
It may well be true, as Judge Posner suggests, that Mr. Hussein can obtain all the relief he requests through his section 1981 claim. The court’s failure to vacate the Title VII claim is still disturbing. This is the second time in the last several months that this circuit has exhibited a reluctance to implement traditional remedial devices for the protection of the constitutional right to a jury trial. See First Nat’l Bank of Waukesha v. Warren, 796 F.2d 999 (7th Cir.1986).
There is another reason why the court has an obligation to vacate the Title VII portion of the judgment. No matter what Mr. Hussein’s wishes might be and no matter when he expressed them, this court has an independent institutional concern for, as Judge Lombard put it in Heyman, “the integrity of the judicial process.” The judiciary, he wrote, has “a substantial concern in the consistent determination of any particular question.” Heyman, 456 F.2d at 131. That concern, according to the Hey-man court, was not dependent on the actions of the parties because “[w]ere [the court] to remand only the legal claims, [it] would create a situation ripe with the possibility of inconsistent determinations of the same question.” Id.; see also Calnetics Corp., 532 F.2d at 690 n. 25.

. To the extent that Mr. Hussein’s allegations of discrimination are based on alleged racial slurs of co-workers, it must be remembered that "a company certainly is not liable for every racial slur by a nonsupervisory member of its work force.” Hunter v. Allis-Chalmers Corp., 797 F.2d 1417, 1421 (7th Cir.1986). “But failure to take reasonable steps to prevent a barrage of racist acts, epithets, and threats can make an employer liable if management-level employees knew, or in the exercise of reasonable care should have known, about the campaign of harassment.” Id.
[An] employer who has reason to know that one of his employees is being harassed in the workplace by others on grounds of race, sex, religion, or national origin, and does nothing about it, is blameworthy. He is unlikely to know or have reason to know of casual, isolated, and infrequent slurs; it is only when they are so egregious, numerous, and concentrated as to add up to a campaign of harassment that the employer will be culpable for failing to discover what is going on and to take remedial steps. Other grounds for the distinction between the isolated slur and the campaign of harassment are that, the more slurs there are, the more harm they will do to the victim and the more the employer can do about them. He can reduce the frequency of racial slurs markedly, even if not to zero — so long as their frequency is not close to zero to begin with.
Id. at 1422.