Court Opinion

ID: 9476031
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:46:25.49632+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:06.145939
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge.
I agree with everything in Judge Ripple’s opinion except the setting aside of the judgment for the defendant on the plaintiff’s Title VII claim. I agree with Judge Eschbach that the judgment on Title VII should be affirmed, but not that the consequence of affirmance is to bar the plaintiff’s section 1981 claim by virtue of the doctrine of collateral estoppel. There is thus a majority (though not the same majority) for (1) ordering a new trial on the section 1981 claim and (2) affirming the dismissal of the Title VII claim.
The district court dismissed the plaintiff’s section 1981 claim on the erroneous ground that the statute protects only American Negroes, and his Title VII claim on the ground that the trial showed that the defendant had not violated the plaintiff’s rights under this statute. The plaintiff chose not to appeal the latter dismissal. The defendant in its appeal brief advanced an alternative ground to that adopted by the district court for upholding the dismissal of the section 1981 claim: that the findings made by the judge after the bench trial on the Title VII claim collaterally es-top the plaintiff to prove that he was a victim of racial discrimination, thus rendering academic the question whether the district court erred in dismissing the section 1981 claim before trial. In his reply brief the plaintiff for the first time asked us to set aside the dismissal of his Title VII claim, as well as the dismissal of his section 1981 claim.
The plaintiff was entitled to urge rejection of the defendant’s collateral estoppel argument. This ground was injected into the appeal by the defendant after the plaintiff filed his appeal brief. An appellant is not required to anticipate and rebut in his opening brief every possible ground for affirmance that the defendant might (or might not) raise. “The brief writer should never forget that the judges are reading the briefs in six eases in preparation for each day of oral argument. The writer must select what is important and deal only with that; all that is not necessary should be ruthlessly discarded. Except in unusually complicated cases, a brief that treats more than three or four matters runs a serious risk of becoming too diffused and giving the overall impression that no one claimed error can be very serious.” Practitioner’s Handbook for Appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit 42 (1986). It is enough if the appellant contests the grounds on which the district court actually decided the case against him. So it wasn’t too late for the plaintiff, in his reply brief, to point out the fallacy of the defendant’s argument for collateral estoppel.
But it was neither necessary nor proper (in view of the limited scope of his appeal) for the plaintiff to go further in his reply brief and ask us to set aside the Title VII *360judgment. A reply brief is for replying, not for raising a new ground or, as in this case, challenging a part of the judgment that the appellant decided not to challenge in his opening brief. See 7th Cir. Rule 28(e); Shlay v. Montgomery, 802 F.2d 918, 922 n. 2 (7th Cir.1986). If we acceded to the request in the plaintiffs reply brief, the result would be to enable him not only to try his section 1981 claim unhampered by the findings made by the district court after the trial of the Title VII claim, but also to get a new trial of that claim even though in his opening brief he expressed no desire for such a trial. Since he can get all the relief he wants under section 1981, he has little or nothing to gain as a practical matter from obtaining a retrial on Title VII as well — which is no doubt why he did not ask in his opening brief for such a retrial. But in any event we must and do hold him to his waiver.