Justia U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

After the September 11, 2011 attacks, the government detained plaintiff, an American citizen, as an enemy combatant. Plaintiff alleged that he was held incommunicado in military detention, subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and detained under harsh conditions of confinement, all in violation of his constitutional and statutory rights. Plaintiff and his mother sued John Yoo, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from 2001 to 2003, alleging that they suffered from plaintiff's unlawful detention. The court held that, under recent Supreme Court law, Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, the court was compelled to conclude that, regardless of the legality of plaintiff's detention and the wisdom of Yoo's judgments, at the time he acted the law was not "sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he [wa]s doing violated[d]" plaintiff's rights. Therefore, the court held that Yoo must be granted qualified immunity and accordingly reversed the decision of the district court.

Plaintiff appealed the district court's grant of summary judgment to the Commissioner in its review of the Commissioner's denial of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Social Security Income (SSI) benefits. Based on the rarity of the surveillance system monitor jobs, and considering plaintiff's physical and mental limitations, the court was compelled to find that the ALJ's decision was not supported by substantial evidence. Accordingly, the court reversed the district court's grant of summary judgment and remanded for further proceedings.

This case arose when defendants contended that they were engaged in bona fide mining activities on National Forest System lands, which justified full-time residency on their respective claim sites. The court held that the Forest Service could regulate residential occupancy of bona fide mining claims within the national forests, and that 36 C.F.R. 261.10(b) was consistent with the mining laws and not unconstitutionally vague. The court further held that in a criminal proceeding predicated on the Forest Service's administrative determination, a defendant could obtain judicial review of the agency action under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), 5 U.S.C. 500 et seq., so long as defendant complied with the procedural requirements for direct review and the APA's statute of limitations has not expired. Thus, defendant Everist was not entitled to judicial review of the Forest Service's determination that his residency was not reasonably incident to mining, because he did not exhaust his administrative remedies as required by the APA. Defendant Backlund, on the other had, did administratively exhaust his claim that the Forest Service's denial of his proposed plan of operations was not in accordance with law. Therefore, Backlund was entitled to judicial review of the agency decision in the context of his criminal prosecution.

Plaintiff appealed the district court's dismissal of claims he brought against Board Members, in their individual capacities, under 42 U.S.C. 1983. Plaintiff alleged that the Board Members deprived him of his constitutional rights when, in an ex parte emergency proceeding, they summarily suspended his authority to prescribe medication. The court held that the Board Members were absolutely immune from plaintiff's claims for money damages where they were functionally comparable to judges and their summary suspension authority was comparable to a judicial act. The court also held that Younger abstention barred plaintiff's claims for equitable relief. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment.

The Government appealed from an award of attorneys' fees to a plaintiff conservation group in a long-running dispute involving federal grazing permits in Idaho. At issue was whether the district court properly awarded fees to plaintiff for legal work done in the administrative proceedings conducted before the civil litigation in which the district court held that the IBLA had acted arbitrarily and capriciously in upholding the Government's award of some of the grazing permits. The court vacated the district court's award of fees and remanded for it to enter an award that excluded the representing fees for the administrative proceedings pursuant to the court's interpretation of Sullivan v. Hudson and 28 U.S.C. 2412(d)(1)(A).

This case involved intellectual property related to the Superman character created by writer Jerome Siegel and illustrator Joe Schuster. In 2010, D.C. Comics filed a lawsuit against Marc Toberoff, owner of a joint venture with the heirs of Shuster and Siegel (Heirs), the Heirs, and three entities in which Toberoff owned a controlling interest (collectively, petitioners), claiming that Toberoff interfered with its contractual relationships with the Heirs. Toberoff had hired lawyer David Michaels to work for one of his companies. Michaels remained in Toberoff's employ for only about three months before absconding with copies of several documents from the Siegel and Shuster files. These documents formed the basis of this lawsuit. About a month after the suit was filed, Toberoff asked the U.S. Attorney to investigate Michaels and, in response, the U.S. Attorney's Office issued a grand jury subpoena for the documents at issue as well as a letter stating that if Toberoff voluntarily complied with the subpoena, the Government would "not provide the...documents...to non-governmental third parties except as may be required by law or court order." At issue was whether a party waived attorney-client privilege forever by voluntarily disclosing privileged documents to the federal government. Given that Congress has declined broadly to adopt a new privilege to protect disclosures of attorney-client privileged materials to the government, the court would not do so here. The court also rejected petitioner's assertion that even if the court rejected selective waiver as a general matter, the court should enforce a purported confidentiality agreement based upon the letter from the U.S. Attorney's Office where petitioners have provided no convincing reason that post hoc contracts regarding how information could be revealed encouraged frank conversation at the time of the advice. The court further rejected petitioners' remaining claims and denied the petition for mandamus.

Proposition 200, Ariz. Rev. Stat. 16-166(F)(the registration provision), required prospective voters in Arizona to provide proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote and required registered voters to show identification to cast a ballot at the polls, Ariz. Rev. Stat. 16-579(A)(the poll place provision). At issue on appeal was whether Proposition 200 violated section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), 42 U.S.C. 1973, was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment or Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution, or was void as inconsistent with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), 42 U.S.C. 1973gg et seq. The court upheld Proposition 200's requirement that voters show identification at the polling place, but concluded that the NVRA superseded Proposition 200's registration provision as that provision was applied to applicants using the National Mail Voter Registration Form to register to vote in federal elections.

Plaintiff appealed the district court's decision affirming the Commission's denial of her application for disability insurance benefits and supplemental security income under the Social Security Act (SSA), 42 U.S.C. 301 et seq. The court held that the ALJ did not err in weighing the evidence as she did or finding that plaintiff's testimony regarding the severity of her impairment was not credible. Although the ALJ erred in failing to give germane reasons for rejecting the lay witness testimony, such error was harmless given that the lay testimony described the same limitations as plaintiff's own testimony, and the ALJ's reasons for rejecting plaintiff's testimony applied with equal force to the lay testimony. Applying the principles set forth in the court's social security cases, as well as in Shinseki v. Sanders, the court upheld the ALJ's decision as supported by substantial evidence.

Plaintiff environmental groups sought to enjoin the implementation of a statute, Section 1713 of the 2011 Appropriations Act, that ordered the Secretary of the Interior to remove a portion of a distinct population of gray wolves from the Protections of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), 16 U.S.C. 1531, without regard to any statute or regulation that might otherwise apply. Plaintiffs brought this action contending that Section 1713 violated the separation of powers. The district court rejected plaintiffs' claims on the grounds that Congress had acted within its constitutional authority to change the laws applicable to pending litigation. The court held that because this case was controlled by Robertson v. Seattle Audubon Society, the court affirmed the judgment.

Plaintiff was injured when the automobile in which he was traveling collided with an automobile owned and driven by an off-duty sailor whose negligence was conceded. Plaintiff and his wife brought suit against the United States on a theory of respondeat superior. The court concluded that a servicemember en route to participation in a recreational activity, where participation was encouraged by the Navy but not required, was not acting in the line of duty. Accordingly, the court affirmed the district court's grant of summary judgment for the government.