Daily Opinion Summaries
U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals
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Summaries for August 8, 2014
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| Docket: 13-3846 | Opinion Date: August 7, 2014 |
| Judge: Hamilton |
| Areas of Law: Injury Law |
Edmund Carman died after crashing his car into the back of a commercial pickup truck. His estate filed suit alleging state negligence claims in federal district court against the truck's driver (Daniel Tinkes), the driver's employer, and the truck's owner, invoking the court's diversity jurisdiction. The court affirmed the district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of defendants where a jury could find that Tinkes had illegally passed the other truck on the right but that a jury could not find that Tinkes's violation caused Carman to crash into his truck from the rear in the lane that Tinkes was leaving.
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| Docket: 13-2433 | Opinion Date: August 7, 2014 |
| Judge: Hamilton |
| Areas of Law: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Labor & Employment Law |
Plaintiff filed suit against her employer, alleging claims of retaliation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. 2000e et seq. Plaintiff also alleged that her employer and several managers retaliated against her in violation of the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), 28 U.S.C. 2601 et seq. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of defendants. The court rejected the idea that the passage of a particular amount of time between protected activity and retaliation can bar the claim as a matter of law. In this case, plaintiff has offered evidence of other retaliatory behavior between her 2003 sexual harassment complaint and the 2006 reorganizations and demotion that bridged the gap between the two events, leaving the issues of causation for a jury. Accordingly, the court reversed and remanded for trial.
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| Docket: 13-2633 | Opinion Date: August 7, 2014 |
| Judge: Hamilton |
| Areas of Law: Constitutional Law, Energy, Oil & Gas Law, Zoning, Planning & Land Use |
CEnergy filed suit against Glenmore claiming a denial of its right under the Fourteenth Amendment to substantive due process and a violation of the town's state law obligation to deal in good faith. While CEnergy obtained a conditional use permit from Glenmore to develop a wind farm, the company failed to obtain required building permits in time to take advantage of a lucrative opportunity to sell electricity generated by wind turbines to a Wisconsin power company. The court concluded that the town board's decision to delay action on CEnergy's building permit requests could not have been arbitrary in the constitutional sense. Even if the board's treatment of the building permit applications had been arbitrary in the constitutional sense, CEnergy still would have failed to state a substantive due process claim where a plaintiff who ignores potential state law remedies cannot state a substantive due process claim based on a state-created property right. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment of the district court.
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