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We in Texas take our cheer leading seriously--seriously enough for some to make a federal case out of it apparently.
For that is what happened in Sanches v. Carrollton-Farmers Branch I.S.D. where complaints over not making the squad escalated to a federal civil rights lawsuit under Title IX and 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
Hat tip to the ABA Blog and Above The Law for noticing the case first.
If some lawyers might think twice about seeking federal remedies over such facts, a cautious lawyer might think thrice about whether and how to appeal to the Fifth Circuit.
After the break, a word about how you can make a weak claim worse through bad grammar or by failing to take some time to sleep on it before you cast darts at the lower court.
When I was a wee lad just starting out here at Andrews Kurth, I sometimes thought the amount of proofreading and cite checking we lavished on our briefing was excessive. I mean, the final days before a brief got filed were quite expensive. And we always had to allow for that time, so our briefs were "final" (for all intents and purposes) about a week before they were filed, and then were just sharpened, honed, corrected and cite checked.
But I was eventually indoctrinated into the ways of The Force. I now take as a given that lack of time and care will show in the product, eroding the professional appearance of the attorneys or even the merits of the client's case. I seldom think on it.
Until Sanches reminded me.
The opening paragraph of the opinion gives the plaintiff's case a characterization from which it had no hope of recovery:
Reduced to its essentials, this is nothing more than a dispute, fueled by a disgruntled cheerleader mom, over whether her daughter should have made the squad. It is a petty squabble, masquerading as a civil rights matter, that has no place in federal court or any other court.
The opinion reveals the damage done by errors that time and attention might have prevented. The substantive mistake was turning a complaint of legal error into a personal attack on the lower court. But the substantive error was compounded, believe it or not, by bad grammar:
Not content to raise this issue of law in a professional manner, Sanches and her attorneys launched an unjustified attack on Magistrate Judge Stickney.
* * *
These sentences are so poorly written that it is difficult to decipher what the attorneys mean, but any plausible reading is troubling, and the quoted passage is an unjustified and most unprofessional and disrespectful attack on the judicial process in general and the magistrate judge assignment here in particular. This may be a suggestion that Magistrate Judge Stickney is incompetent. It might be an assertion that all federal magistrate judges are incompetent. It could be an allegation that only Article III judges are competent. Or it may only mean that Magistrate Judge Stickney’s decisions in this case are incompetent, a proposition that is absurd in light of the correctness of his impressive rulings. Under any of these possible readings, the attorneys’ attack on Magistrate Judge Stickney’s decisionmaking is reprehensible.
The court set out the objectionable sentences, verbatim:
The Magistrate’s egregious errors in its [sic] failure to utilize or apply the law constitute extraordinary circumstances, justifying vacateur [sic] of the assignment to [sic] Magistrate. Specifically, the Magistrate applied improper legal standards in deciding the Title IX elements of loss of educational opportunities and deliberate indifference, ignoring precedent. Further, the Court failed to consider Sanches’ Section 1983 claims and summarily dismissed them without analysis or review. Because a magistrate is not an Article III judge, his incompetence in applying general principals [sic] of law are [sic] extraordinary.
And then it took the time to drop a note about the grammatical errors:
Usually we do not comment on technical and grammatical errors, because anyone can make such an occasional mistake, but here the miscues are so egregious and obvious that an average fourth grader would have avoided most of them. For example, the word “principals” should have been “principles.” The word “vacatur” is misspelled. The subject and verb are not in agreement in one of the sentences, which has a singular subject (“incompetence”) and a plural verb (“are”). Magistrate Judge Stickney is referred to as “it” instead of “he” and is called a “magistrate” instead of a “magistrate judge.” And finally, the sentence containing the word “incompetence” makes no sense as a matter of standard English prose, so it is not reasonably possible to understand the thought, if any, that is being conveyed. It is ironic that the term “incompetence” is used here, because the only thing that is incompetent is the passage itself.
Surely, every appeal involves the contention that a judge has erred. But the umpire is seldom blind or corrupt in actuality. All the more reason to take some time and "sleep on it" before turning a claim of error into an attack on the officer himself. In the very rare case it turns out to be true, the complaint ought to be written in prose worthy of your A.P. English teacher, if it is written at all.
First do no harm. Don't make a bad situation worse by filing something that is ill-considered or insufficiently corrected.
© 2012 Andrews Kurth LLPAbout the Author
