Court Opinion

ID: 9485989
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:35:27.299532+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:28.951938
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
with whom ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge, joins, dissenting.
I am pleased to join Judge Cummings’ eloquent and extraordinarily perceptive dissent. He has succeeded in introducing reality into what is so frequently a superficial and wooden approach to applying the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Even though Mozee and Lud-dington are now the law of this Circuit, I agree with Judge Cummings that, despite those cases, or perhaps because of them, the 1991 Act properly applies to Mojica’s post-Act trial.
I, of course, emphatically dissented as a panel member from the court’s refusal in Mozee to apply the 1991 Act to pre-Act and pre-Patterson conduct. The result in that ease I regarded as incorrect and unjust. It seems to me that the manipulation of musty maxims and presumptions of retroactivity and prospectivity has managed to leverage the fleeting months when Patterson was on the books into a much longer and continuing denial of the full protection of the civil rights laws. The manifest intent of Congress, as well documented by Judge Cummings, was to obliterate as expeditiously as possible Patterson and a number of other Supreme Court decisions that narrowed and limited longstanding protections of the civil rights laws. As Judge Cummings points out, all parties have been on full notice of the substance of those protections for a long time; they certainly do not come as a complete surprise to Gannett or other defendants. The Act, insofar as I am concerned here, merely restored the law promptly to the course it had followed for years. It seems to me wholly unrealistic to believe that Congress wanted to endow Patterson and similar eases with some sort of life after death. Hence, I cannot countenance their continued application long after they have been legislatively erased from the books. I, therefore, respectfully dissent.