Chicago Teachers Union, Local 1 American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO et al v. Board Of Education City Of Chicago

Filing 174

MEMORANDUM. Signed by the Honorable Milton I. Shadur on 5/15/2017. Mailed notice(ep, )

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
EASTERN DIVISION

CHICAGO TEACHERS UNION, LOCAL 1,
AMERICAN FEDERAL OF TEACHERS,
AFL-CIO, TERRI FELLS, LILLIAN
EDMONDS, and JOSEPHINE HAMILTON
PERRY, individually and on behalf of all
similarly situated persons,
Plaintiffs,
v.
BOARD OF EDUCATION OF THE CITY
OF CHICAGO, a body politic and corporate,
Defendant.

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Case No. 12 C 10338

MEMORANDUM
This Court has just received a copy of the "Petition of Defendant-Appellant Board of
Education of the City of Chicago for Permission To Appeal Pursuant To Federal Rule of Civil
Procedure 23(F)," filed last Friday before the Court of Appeals. Because that filing has seriously
altered the thrust of this Court's April 28, 2017 memorandum opinion and order (the
"Opinion") -- something of which Board's counsel has to be well aware from the extended
in-court colloquy among counsel for the parties and this Court on that date -- this memorandum
is issued in the hope that the Court of Appeals will not be misled by the filing.
It should first be noted that this is not the first effort by Board's counsel to seek an
interlocutory review of class certification in this action under Fed. R. Civ. P. 25(f). Almost
exactly two years ago (in Dkt. No. 96 dated May 22, 2015) this Court granted the motion of
plaintiff Chicago Teachers Union and its three individual co-plaintiffs (collectively "Teachers

Union" for convenience) for class certification. 1 Two weeks later Board's counsel filed a
Rule 23(f) petition for interlocutory review (Dkt. No. 99 dated June 5, 2015), and after the
parties' completion of their briefing on the matter before the Court of Appeals it issued an order
(Dkt. No. 104 dated August 19, 2015) that denied the Board's petition for interlocutory review.
It should be made clear, as the Opinion stated, that this Court has not at all subscribed to
Teachers Union's awkward use of the word "terminated" in its earlier versions of its Complaint.
Indeed, as pages 2 through 4 of the Opinion were careful to point out, both Board's counsel and
Teachers Union's counsel have used the terms "termination" and "layoff" as synonymous in the
context of their dispute. In fact the Board's counsel have themselves expressly recognized that
Teachers Union was claiming and had always claimed that there was a disparate impact on
African-American members of Teachers Union resulting from the layoffs that took place
following the 2010-2011 school year (see the language employed by Board's counsel separately
and in their joinder in the joint report by counsel for the litigants on both sides, as quoted at
pages 3 and 4 of the Opinion -- language that Board's counsel employed this past year after the
rejection of Board's attempted interlocutory appeal referred to earlier in this memorandum).
This action is already longer in the tooth than it should be, a product of course of its
complexity as well as of the parties' extensive battles on every aspect of the lawsuit. As the
April 28 Opinion concluded:
This opinion's issuance has been accelerated to enable the earlier scheduled
May 1 status hearing to be held, at this point for purposes of discussing the future
course of the litigation.
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1
That issue, like every other dispute in this litigation, had been the subject of extensive
contested submissions by the parties.

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In this Court's view no one's interest would be served by a time-consuming longitudinal
extension of the litigation process as the result of what it views as a mischaracterization of its
ruling by Board's counsel.

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Milton I. Shadur
Senior United States District Judge
Date: May 15, 2017

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