Shaw v. LAUSD, No. B315814 (D2d4 Sept. 9, 2023)
This is a super important education case brought by some of my partners that alleges that a series of LAUSD-UTLA collective bargaining side deals to deal with remote learning during the pandemic violated LAUSD students’ rights to equal educational opportunities under the State Constitution and the Education Code. Congrats to my partners Ned and Mark and Sierra.
But in this venue, I’m gonna leave the substance to the ed reform lawyers. There are, however, a bunch of interesting procedural issues that are worth noting.
They mostly arise from the procedural posture of the case. Plaintiffs got their complaint on file early in the 2020-21 school year. They tried to file a preliminary injunction as a noticed motion. But because their case was brought as a class action, the (completely non-statutory or rule based) automatic stay that issues in LA Civil Complex departments prevented them from getting that on file for a long long time. There was some also discovery fighting and later, an amended complaint. While that was all pending, the Legislation governing distance learning expired, as did the the final LAUSD-UTLA side letter, which ran to the end of the 2021 school year.
The District moved to strike the operative complaint’s prayer for retrospective injunctive relief, arguing that it was not a proper form or relief and that is could not be obtained on a class wide basis. The Union moved to strike the class allegations for failure to establish a well-defined community of interests. Both defendants demurred to the operative complaint on mootness grounds. The trial court essentially granted all the motions. Plaintiffs appealed.
After some confusing discussion about forfeiture and waiver, the Court of Appeal offers up an interesting discussion of the relationship between mootness and remedies. People who live in federal court world probably know this intuitively. Under the classic formulation of Article III standing, to have standing, a plaintiff must have (1) suffered an injury in fact, (2) that is fairly traceable to the challenged conduct of the defendant, and (3) that is likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision. See Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 559–560 (1992). As Justice Powell explained almost 50 years ago, the “standing question . . . bears close affinity to questions of ripeness—whether the harm asserted has matured sufficiently to warrant judicial intervention—and of mootness—whether the occasion for judicial intervention persists.” Warth v. Seldin, 422 U.S. 490, 499 n.10 (1975). That is, a case is moot when, due to events after filing, the court can no longer provide any meaningful remedy.
California state court does not have article III standing, so the relationship between mootness and the viability or remedies is less clear-cut doctrinally, but the court does a good job of explaining the relationship here. The upshot of that is if the trial court erred in striking the class allegations and the claim for retrospective injunctive relief, the mootness issue essentially falls with those rulings.
That brings up two related questions: 1. When can you strike class allegations at the pleadings stage; 2. Is there even such a thing as retrospective injunctive relief.
On the first question, striking class allegations on the pleadings, without taking any evidence, is pretty disfavored. Generally, a challenge to the viability of a class action needs to wait until class certification, so long as the complaint alleges facts that (1) there is an ascertainable class of plaintiffs; and (2) there are common questions of law and fact among them. Generally questions of predominance, and manageability, and typicality must await the more detailed analysis undertaken at class certification.
The Court of Appeal says that the trial court erred in striking the class allegations based on its assessment that to the extent retrospective injunctive relief is even a thing, it can’t be managed on a class-wide basis. Since the complaint showed that a class was clearly ascertainable (LAUSD students during the pandemic) and the were obvious common questions (the legality of LAUSD policy and the UTLA-LAUSD deals) that should have been the end of the inquiry at the pleadings stage. As the Court notes, there is no authority supporting the striking of class allegations on the pleadings due to the purported lack of a class-wide remedy.
So far as retrospective injunctive relief, of course that is a real thing. If a defendant’s violations of the law hurt the plaintiff in a way that can’t be fixed with money, the court clearly has the power to order the defendant to do things prospectively that remediate that harm. No doubt, those kinds of remedies re less common and harder to judicially administer than a typical prohibitory injunction that just says “stop doing x.” But, in the right circumstances, an equitable remedy to fix past harms is available. The Court cites cases providing the classic remedy of the reinstatement of a wrongfully terminated employee or the award of credit wrongfully withheld.
The Court then addresses the Union’s claim that, given the expiration of the side letters, it should be let out of the case. The only reason the Union got sued here was as a “relief defendant”—a defendant who is not in the case for committing its acts that harmed the plaintiff (the Union owes the plaintiffs no duty), but which needs to be present to afford effective relief. Ironically, the reason the Union got sued here was to avoid the result of another case involving UTLA—Reed v. United Teachers Los Angeles, 208 Cal.App.4th 322 (2012)*—an education reform case where UTLA successfully blew up a settlement agreement between LAUSD and student plaintiffs because, although UTLA wasn’t a party, the terms of the settlement affected the rights of its members. The Court points out Reed requires keeping the Union in the case as a necessary party.
Finally, the Court holds that Plaintiffs’ challenge to the legality of automatic stay in L.A. Superior complex is non-justiciable. The theory was that the stay—which is not grounded in any statutory or rule-based authority—deprived Plaintiffs’ of their statutory right to move for a preliminary injunction. But the stuff Plaintiffs wanted to restrain—LAUSD’s distance learning polices and the LAUSD-UTLA side letters—have all since lapsed. So that question actually is moot. As the Court notes in explaining that the question is not one that evades review, a writ of mandate was available to challenge the stay, and some future plaintiff will be able to do so.
Reversed.
*Full disclosure: I worked, briefly, on appellate issues in Reed a long time ago.
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