This case arose after plaintiff Glen Dale Simkunas was arrested and charged with the 1982 rape and murder of Susan Marie Schaaf; the charges were later dismissed, and Simkunas sued two Hickory Hills police officers under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for alleged civil rights violations plus pendent state claims of false arrest and malicious prosecution. The court granted the officers' motion for summary judgment on the federal claims. It held that qualified immunity shielded the officers because Simkunas had not shown they violated any clearly established constitutional right of which a reasonable officer would have known. The court then dismissed the state-law counts for lack of an independent basis of federal jurisdiction.
In Ely v. Department of Justice, a federal prisoner sued the Department of Justice, the U.S. Attorney's Office, and two individuals under the Privacy Act of 1974, alleging that an assistant U.S. attorney improperly disclosed FBI records about him to his court-appointed attorney in a separate civil rights lawsuit without his consent, and that the agencies failed to properly account for or safeguard the records. The court granted the defendants' motions to dismiss and for summary judgment, dismissing the entire action with prejudice. It held that the individual defendants could not be sued under the Act, that the disclosure fell within the routine use exception, and that the plaintiff had not alleged any adverse effect causally linked to the claimed accounting or safeguarding violations. The court reasoned that the only alleged harm stemmed from the disclosure itself, which did not violate the Act.
The case involved wage-earning plaintiffs suing the United States and the IRS Commissioner pro se, claiming that withholding and payment of income taxes on wages violated the Sixteenth Amendment and seeking injunctive and declaratory relief to exempt them from taxation. The court granted the defendants' motion to dismiss for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. Sovereign immunity barred the action because no statutory waiver was asserted. The Anti-Injunction Act prohibited suits to restrain tax assessment or collection absent narrow exceptions not met here, and the Declaratory Judgment Act expressly excluded controversies involving federal taxes.
In this case, plaintiff Marcus Aguilera, a Mexican American, sued the Cook County Police and Corrections Merit Board under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, alleging that its requirements for correctional officer positions—a high school education or equivalent and a mental ability examination—discriminated against Spanish Surnamed Americans on the basis of national origin by having a disparate impact. The court granted the defendant's motion for summary judgment. It found that Aguilera failed to present conclusive statistics showing a disparate impact from the education requirement on qualified applicants in the relevant labor market, and that even if such an impact existed, the defendant demonstrated the requirement's manifest relationship to the job due to the similarities between correctional officers and other law enforcement roles involving firearms and authority. For the mental ability test, statistics showed that SSA applicants had a higher pass rate than the overall applicant pool, so no prima facie case of discrimination was established.
This case involves claims by Oakhill Cemetery and its officer/shareholder Roark against multiple banks, former officers, directors, and shareholders alleging violations of federal securities laws (including Rule 10b-5 and Section 17(a)) and related state law claims arising from stock purchases, loans, promissory notes, and asset transfers that allegedly involved misrepresentations, unauthorized transactions, and mismanagement of corporate funds. The district court addressed motions to dismiss by several defendants and a motion for summary judgment, focusing on federal claims in Counts III through XV. The court dismissed the federal securities claims, holding that Oakhill lacked standing as a purchaser or seller in certain transactions under Blue Chip Stamps, that internal corporate actions like stock repurchases funded by loans did not constitute federal securities fraud but instead involved state-law corporate governance issues under Santa Fe Industries v. Green, and that jurisdictional limits under 12 U.S.C. § 94 precluded pendent jurisdiction over national banks. Some state-law claims and claims by Roark in his individual capacity were not fully resolved in the excerpted portion.
This case concerns a Wisconsin grain company that purchased a storage bin manufactured by an Illinois defendant; after the bin's roof collapsed, the plaintiff sought damages for repair costs, lost profits, and the purchase price under theories of strict tort liability, negligence, and breach of express and implied warranties, along with class allegations. The court addressed a motion to dismiss in this diversity action by first determining that Illinois substantive law applies to the tort claims under choice-of-law principles. It held that Illinois does not permit recovery in tort for purely economic loss and therefore dismissed the strict liability and negligence counts. On the warranty claims, the court examined privity requirements, the effect of any disclaimers, and pleading standards before denying dismissal in part and granting it in part.