Court Opinion

ID: 9475742
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:36:56.426566+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:54.253045
License: Public Domain

RIPPLE, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I join my brothers in that part of the court’s judgment which remands this case for further consideration with respect to the imposition of sanctions under the so-called “American Rule” and its traditional exceptions. I would also permit the district court to reassess the record and to consider once again the imposition of sanctions under Rule 11.
The court’s broad-brush treatment of the applicability of Rule 11 is disturbing. Particularly disturbing is the court’s failure to recognize that the rule is designed to redress more than harm to individual parties. It is also designed to curb the significant trauma inflicted on the judicial system when judges must deal with pleadings and documents which are not well-founded in law or in fact. As the court states, our litigation system is adversarial, not inquisitorial. However, we abandoned long ago the primitive notion that the adversary system of civil litigation was a game of hide- and-seek where litigation can be unreasonably protracted and a busy district court’s time wasted because “no one ever asked.” Maj. op. at 452. A party can be sanctioned “for not winning quickly or cheaply enough,” maj. op. at 454, when its affirmative representations have caused the court to needlessly continue litigation which, if the party had lived up to its obligation, would have been terminated. Pleadings play a unique role in litigation. They present the basic theory of the litigant and *457determine the scope of the discovery process and of the trial. When pleadings are misleading, the course of the subsequent proceedings will necessarily be misleading — and wasteful. Rule 11 was designed to curb such an abuse and nothing but the court’s ipse dixit prevents it from fulfilling that role.
The court also fails to recognize that misrepresentations violative of Rule 11 need not take the form of blatant lies. Half-truths can be just as pernicious and, indeed, because of their subtlety, more burdensome on the busy trial judge who, in a day’s work, must shift attention among many matters. While, as the court points out, the record before us is not clear, the trial judge may well have ample grounds for his conclusion that the failure of D’Alterio to make careful inquiry with respect to the facts caused a needless waste of time for the litigants and the court.
Certainly, in determining whether sanctions are appropriate, a district judge must “ ‘avoid using the wisdom of hindsight and should test the signer’s conduct by inquiring what was reasonable to believe at the time the pleading, motion, or other paper was submitted.’ ” Maj. op. at 454 (quoting Advisory Committee Notes). However, the experienced district judge — and Judge McGarr certainly is within that category— who has lived with the litigation and worked with the lawyers throughout the pretrial stages of the litigation is certainly capable of making such a judgment. Once that judgment is adequately set forth on the record, a reviewing court should, I respectfully suggest, give substantial deference to that judgment. Accordingly, I would permit the district judge to determine whether D’Alterio, by failing to make prompt and adequate inquiry, unnecessarily prolonged this litigation.
Rule ll’s birth was not an easy one. We should be careful — much more careful than the court is today — before we limit its utility in curbing abuses which delay deserving litigants in receiving their day in court.