Court Opinion

ID: 9468167
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:07:15.876489+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:44.102731
License: Public Domain

SOFAER, District Judge,
concurring;
I concur in Judge Newman’s thorough opinion, but write separately to emphasize that the limitations period of CPLR § 214(2) is not merely, as the Court holds, an appropriate provision to borrow for actions brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983; but rather is squarely applicable to such suits.
*867The three-year period of section 214(2) applies to “an action to recover upon a’ liability . . . created or imposed by statute. . . N.Y. C.P.L.R.- § 214(2) (emphasis added). The issue, therefore, is not merely whether section 1983 creates liability, but also whether. it is a statute that imposes liability. Chapman v. Houston Welfare Rights Organization, 441 U.S. 600, 99 S.Ct. 1905, 60 L.Ed.2d 508 (1979), did indeed hold that section 1983 does “not provide for any substantive rights”; as the Court put it, “one cannot go into court and claim a ‘violation of § 1983’ — for § 1983 by itself does not protect anyone against anything.” Id. at 617, 99 S.Ct. at 1915. But the issue before the Court in Chapman was whether, for the jurisdictional purposes of 28 U.S.C. § 1343, section 1983 was a statute securing “equal rights” or “civil rights” — not, as in the present context, whether liability in a federal civil rights action is imposed by statute. The Court, in fact, recognized that section 1983 “served to ensure that an individual had a cause of action for violations of the Constitution, which in the Fourteenth Amendment embodied and extended to all individuals as against state action the substantive protections afforded by § 1 of the 1866 Act.” Id. (footnote omitted). In other words, although the Constitution creates the substantive right asserted in a section 1983 action (other than one brought pursuant to Maine v. Thiboutot, 448 U.S. 1, 100 S.Ct. 2502, 65 L.Ed.2d 555 (1980)), it is section 1983 that imposes civil liability and provides a cause of action in federal court. Although some authority exists for the proposition that suits against state officials for violations of constitutional rights may be brought directly under the Constitution, that is hardly a proposition so well-established as to render section 1983 mere procedural surplusage. Moreover, even if the Supreme Court were to hold that such an action were available in some circumstances, the statement that section 1983 is a liability-imposing statute would nonetheless remain true, for section 1983 would still constitute Congress’s independent authorization of suit and would constitute sole authorization of suit in circumstances in which no direct action was available. Consequently, a section 1983 action falls precisely within the language of section 214(2): it is a suit in which liability is imposed by statute. Clark v. Water Commissioners, 148 N.Y. 1, 108 N.Y.S. 427 (1895), and State v. Cortelle Corp., 38 N.Y.2d 83, 378 N.Y.S.2d 654, 341 N.E.2d 223 (1975), fortify this construction, because they are based upon the rationale that the statutes involved there neither created nor imposed any liability.
The recent decision in Staffen v. Rochester, 80 A.D.2d 16, 18-19, 437 N.Y.S.2d 821, 822-23 (4th Dep’t 1981), incorrectly reads Chapman as holding that section 1983 is not a statute that creates liability. Staffen did not address the possibility that section 1983 could be viewed as a statute imposing, though not creating, liability. Moreover, the New York courts would not adhere to the proposition that section 1983 imposes no liability, in the face of an authoritative federal decision otherwise construing Chapman (a federal decision) and the nature of section 1983 (a federal statute).
Given that we view section 1983, even in light of Chapman, as a statute that imposes liability, we need not reach Judge Mishler’s sensible but difficult conclusion that the Constitution is a “statute” for purposes of section 214(2). That position has implicitly been rejected by the New York courts, to which we are supposed to look for guidance as to the appropriate statute of limitations. A precise reading of Chapman spares us the need to engage in policy analysis that might suggest we are selecting a limitations period that we find convenient, rather than one squarely justified by state-law analogies.