Court Opinion

ID: 9443644
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:26:31.741175+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:33.629491
License: Public Domain

WOODBURY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I agree with my associates in affirming the judgment of the District Court insofar as it dismisses the complaint against the City. Furthermore, I agree with Chief Judge MAGRUDER in everything except the liberality and indulgence with which he reads the allegations of the complaint.
We are not confronted here with allegations which read together indicate a deliberate and calculated course of conduct on the part of the individual defendants having the obvious effect and undertaken for the obvious purpose of depriving the plaintiffs of rights guaranteed to them by federal law. Cf. McCoy v. Providence Journal Co., 1 Cir., 1951, 190 F.2d 760. Instead all that appears in the complaint is that the individual defendants acted “in concert and conspiracy” with one another in submitting the item in the school committee’s estimate of expenditures for 1951 for “Instruction— Personal Services” to the voters at a special election called under Chapter 29 of the Acts of 1950, and furthermore, without statement of particulars, that “in furtherance” of their “conspiracy” they “falsely and grossly misrepresented and misstated the amounts of money called for by the school committee’s estimate” in phrasing the referendum question submitted to the voters. These allegations impress me as mere conclusions of the pleader comparable to the “opprobrious epithets ‘willful’ and ‘malicious’ ” which the Supreme Court in Snowden v. Hughes, 1944, 321 U.S. 1, 10, 64 S.Ct. 397, 88 L.Ed. 497 felt justified in treating as without legal significance on motion to dismiss. Hence I think we can with propriety do likewise here without departing from the rule that on motions to dismiss allegations should be read with liberality and indulgence to the pleader. Thus I would read the complaint as lacking any well pleaded allegations of unworthy *708purpose on the part of the individual defendants, and so reading it I would affirm the judgment ordering it dismissed- for the reason advanced by Chief Judge MAGRU-der;