The EEOC sued Rock Tenn Company on behalf of Cynthia Brown and other female employees at its Conway, Arkansas plant, alleging sexual harassment by a male coworker that created a hostile work environment and led to Brown's constructive discharge. The court denied the company's motion for summary judgment. The decision rested on the existence of triable factual issues about whether Rock Tenn took reasonable steps to address the harassment, including its alleged failure to investigate reports of continued misconduct after an initial warning to the harasser. The court also found factual disputes regarding whether the working conditions were so intolerable that a reasonable person would have felt compelled to resign.
This case arose from a dispute over investments in a Louisiana golf community, where Nuveen initially sued Crews in federal court for negligence and state securities violations based on diversity jurisdiction but later dismissed and refiled in Arkansas state court after learning that business trust beneficiaries' citizenship might destroy diversity. Crews then filed this declaratory judgment action in federal court seeking rulings on both state and federal claims. The court granted Nuveen's motion to dismiss in part, dismissing the state law issues and federal preemption defense for lack of supplemental jurisdiction, but denied dismissal of the federal securities law claims. The core reasoning was that diversity jurisdiction was absent because the citizenship of a business trust includes its beneficiaries under precedents reconciling Navarro and Carden; federal question jurisdiction existed for the federal claims; and the first-filed state action, fairness, federalism, and comity precluded exercising supplemental jurisdiction over the state claims.
This case involved a parent, Stephanie Wright, suing on behalf of her third-grade child and herself after Pulaski County Special School District officials denied permission to distribute flyers for a church-sponsored swimming event through student take-home folders or post them on a school literature rack, citing district policies on solicitation and materials distribution. The court granted the motion for a preliminary injunction, ordering the district to allow distribution of such religious flyers and enjoining enforcement of the relevant policies as applied to church-sponsored materials. The reasoning centered on evidence that the district permitted distribution of various non-school materials from other organizations but excluded church-related ones, which amounted to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment; the policies were not applied neutrally to limit all non-school flyers. The court also found irreparable harm from the restriction on speech rights and that the public interest favored protecting constitutional freedoms.
The case involved Southeast Arkansas Hospice challenging federal Medicare regulations that capped total annual reimbursements to hospice providers based on a per-patient formula. The court dismissed claims for fiscal years 2004, 2005, and 2007 due to the provider's failure to exhaust administrative remedies before the Provider Reimbursement Review Board or to timely seek judicial review. For fiscal year 2009, the court granted partial summary judgment to the provider, declaring the regulation at 42 C.F.R. § 418.309(b) invalid because it conflicted with the clear intent of the underlying statute at 42 U.S.C. § 1395f(i)(2) and permanently enjoining its enforcement against the provider for that year.
In Aaron v. Shelley, the plaintiff sued the City of Jacksonville, Arkansas, and two police officers after being arrested on charges including criminal impersonation of a police officer, false imprisonment, and terroristic threatening, alleging a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights due to lack of probable cause. The court granted summary judgment to the city and the officers in their official capacities, dismissing those claims, but denied summary judgment to the officers in their individual capacities. The core reasoning was that, viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, material issues of fact existed regarding whether the officers had probable cause for the arrest, as the plaintiff had reported suspected drug activity, called police to the scene, and provided contact information without using force or impersonating an officer in a manner that would support the charges. The court further found that qualified immunity did not apply because it was not objectively reasonable for the officers to believe probable cause existed based on the statements of the individuals involved in the drug activity.
In Lee v. Nucor-Yamato Steel Co., a Black employee sued his employer alleging race discrimination, hostile work environment, and retaliation under Title VII and 42 U.S.C. § 1981 based on incidents spanning from the late 1980s through 2005, including racial slurs, graffiti, confederate flags, and denied promotions or positions. The court granted summary judgment in part and denied it in part on the defendants' motion. It dismissed certain discrete claims as untimely or unsupported but allowed the hostile work environment claim to proceed, finding that evidence of repeated racial epithets, primate references, offensive postings, and symbols created a genuine issue of material fact as to whether the harassment was severe and pervasive enough to alter employment conditions and whether the employer knew or should have known of it yet failed to respond adequately.
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