Rothenberg v. Daus

481 F. App'x 667
Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit·Decided June 4, 2012·No. 10-4411-cv·Unpublished·Cited by 8 cases

Opinion

SUMMARY ORDER

Defendant-appellee the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (“TLC”) *670 summarily suspended, then revoked upon hearings, the taxicab driver’s licenses of plaintiffs-appellants Ebrahim Abood, Bou-bacar Doumbia, Konstantinos Katsigiannis, and Saul Rothenberg (“drug-test plaintiffs”) after they failed TLC’s mandatory annual drug test. TLC summarily suspended the taxicab driver’s licenses of plaintiffs-appellants Robert Dyce and Tob-by Kombo, and the for-hire-vehicle (“FHV”) driver’s license of plaintiff-appellant Moustach Ah (“conviction plaintiffs”), after their arrests for off-duty conduct; upon plaintiffs’ convictions, 1 TLC held revocation hearings and revoked plaintiffs’ licenses.

Plaintiffs’ amended complaint alleged that defendants violated plaintiffs’ due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by: (1) imposing revocation without first fairly warning plaintiffs that their conduct would require revocation; (2) denying plaintiffs adequate notice regarding their individual revocation hearings; (3) failing to provide revocation hearings that gave plaintiffs an opportunity to be heard in a meaningful manner; and (4) failing to provide revocation hearings before impartial decision-makers. Plaintiffs also argued that conditioning licensing on mandatory drug testing violated their rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, and that the license-revocation procedures ran afoul of New York statutory and constitutional provisions.

Plaintiffs now appeal from an order of the district court that granted summary judgment for defendants on plaintiffs’ federal claims; dismissed their state-law claims for lack of supplemental jurisdiction; and dismissed the suit as against individual defendants TLC, Matthew Daus, Diane McGrath-McKechnie, Joseph Eckstein, Elizabeth Bonina, and Thomas Coyne. See Rothenberg v. Daus, No. 08 Civ. 567, 2010 WL 3860417, at *2 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 30, 2010) (Order of District Court); Rothenberg v. Daus, No. 08 Civ. 567, 2010 WL 3860425, at *6 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 8, 2010) (Report and Recommendation of Magistrate Judge). For the reasons explained herein, we vacate the dismissal of plaintiffs’ federal due process claims, plaintiffs’ state claims, and plaintiffs’ claims against the individual defendants, and we remand for further proceedings on these claims; we affirm the decision of the district court dismissing TLC as a defendant, and we deem plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment claim forfeited on appeal.

We review de novo a district court’s grant of summary judgment. Serricchio v. Wachovia Secs. LLC, 658 F.3d 169, 179 (2d Cir.2011). The movant must “show[ ] that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.” Fed. R.Civ.P. 56(a). Summary judgment is appropriate only if no rational fact-finder “could find in favor of the nonmoving party because the evidence to support its case is so slight.” Gallo v. Prudential Residential Servs., Ltd. P’ship, 22 F.3d 1219, 1224 (2d Cir.1994).

We first address plaintiffs’ claim that they were denied fair warning in violation of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. “[A] law or regulation whose violation could lead to [a deprivation of life, liberty, or property] must be crafted with sufficient clarity to give the person of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited and to provide *671 explicit standards for those who apply them.” Piscottano v. Murphy, 511 F.3d 247, 280 (2d Cir.2007) (internal quotation marks omitted). “The degree of vagueness that the Constitution tolerates ... depends in part on the nature of the enactment.” Vill. of Hoffman Estates v. Flipside, Hoffman Estates, Inc., 455 U.S. 489, 498, 102 S.Ct. 1186, 71 L.Ed.2d 362 (1982). Thus, “regulations satisfy due process as long as a reasonably prudent person, familiar with the conditions the regulations are meant to address and the objectives the regulations are meant to achieve, has fair warning of what the regulations require.” Rock of Ages Corp. v. Sec’y of Labor, 170 F.3d 148, 156 (2d Cir.1999). Even in the civil regulatory context, however, “we cannot defer to the [agency’s] interpretation of its rules if doing so would penalize an individual who has not received fair notice of a regulatory violation.” Upton v. S.E.C., 75 F.3d 92, 98 (2d Cir.1996).

In granting summary judgment to defendants on this claim, the district court appears to have relied on discrete statements in the regulatory history of the TLC Rules. 2 While such history can inform a vagueness inquiry, that inquiry should begin with the text of the provision, considered “in context, and, where appropriate, with the benefit of canons of statutory construction and legislative history.” United States v. Farhane, 634 F.3d 127, 142 (2d Cir.2011) (citations omitted); see VIP of Berlin, LLC v. Town of Berlin, 593 F.3d 179, 187 (2d Cir.2010); see also Cunney v. Bd. Trs., 660 F.3d 612, 621 (2d Cir.2011). Similarly, while regulated parties should be “familiar with the conditions the regulations are meant to address and the objectives the regulations are meant to achieve,” Rock of Ages, 170 F.3d at 156, the text of the rules themselves is relevant to the analysis, see id. (“Because the plain language of the standard gives fair notice of what it requires, [petitioner] had sufficient notice of the conduct prohibited.” (citation, internal quotation marks, and alteration omitted)). We therefore vacate the grant of summary judgment on this claim and remand for further consideration of the fair warning issue in light of this order. In particular, we identify a number of issues that warrant further briefing and, possibly, record development.

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Rothenberg v. Daus, 481 F. App'x 667 (2d Cir. 2012).

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