National Urban League v. Ross
- Lucy Koh
- 5:20-cv-05799
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 8
In National Urban League v. Ross, Judge Koh granted plaintiffs’ motions to expedite and compel discovery.
The plaintiffs and defendants in the Census litigation were affected. The order required the defendants to produce specified documents and metadata, provide an additional deposition witness, and answer written discovery on an expedited schedule.
What happened
National Urban League and other plaintiffs sued Wilbur L. Ross and other defendants over the 2020 Census’s shortened data-processing plan. The plaintiffs sought discovery about whether the plan could produce a complete, fair, and accurate count.
The plaintiffs said the defendants had produced too few documents, many of them duplicates or lacking basic information about their source and date. They also said delays threatened the case schedule and deadlines for sending census data to the states for redistricting. The defendants had argued that the case should be stayed or that discovery should last longer.
Judge Lucy H. Koh granted both the plaintiffs’ motion to shorten time and expedite and their motion to compel. She ordered the defendants to produce specified documents and metadata, provide an additional witness for a deposition, use metadata in future productions, and respond to interrogatories and requests for admission within 14 days.
The detailed version
- National Urban League v. Ross · No. 5:20-cv-05799
- Lucy Koh
- Dec. 10, 2020
Background
The plaintiffs filed the case on August 18, 2020. The defendants had maintained that their shortened plan for processing the 2020 Census was needed to meet statutory deadlines for reporting congressional apportionment figures and sending redistricting data to the states. After the district court enjoined the plan under the Administrative Procedure Act, the United States Supreme Court stayed that order.
The plaintiffs then sought expedited discovery concerning their claim under the Constitution’s Enumeration Clause. The district court had previously allowed only a limited, accelerated discovery schedule, including five depositions, 10 interrogatories, 25 requests for admission, and 25 requests for production per side. The plaintiffs reported that the defendants had produced only a limited number of documents, many of which were duplicates, and that the production lacked customary metadata.
Reasons for granting the motion
The court held that the requested discovery was relevant to the plaintiffs’ claim and proportional to the needs of the case under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(1). The discovery concerned whether the shortened plan had a reasonable relationship to completing an actual enumeration and whether the defendants had produced a full, fair, and accurate count.
The court found the defendants’ production inadequate. The defendants had produced 175 documents on December 1 and 516 more on December 8. Of the 691 documents produced, the court stated that 391 predated the Bureau’s August 3 announcement of the shortened plan, 116 were calendar invitations without substantive information, and 221 were duplicates. The defendants also had not provided information such as each document’s author, date, file name, and recipients. The court concluded that this violated the document-production requirements of Rule 34(b)(2)(E).
The court also found that the discovery was proportional because the case concerned the integrity of the 2020 Census, which affects political representation and the distribution of public funds; the defendants had primary access to the relevant information; the federal government had resources to provide it; and the likely benefit of the discovery outweighed its cost. The court further found that the defendants’ refusal to meet and confer for two weeks and their delayed production threatened the schedule for depositions, additional written discovery, and expert reports. The court stated that the requests were reasonable, proportional, and tailored to related requests from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the Government Accountability Office.
Order
The court granted the plaintiffs’ motion to shorten time and expedite and granted the plaintiffs’ motion to compel. The defendants were ordered to produce by December 14, 2020:
- Documents sufficient to show the Census Bureau’s current data-processing plans, procedures, and schedule, including changes since October 15, 2020; - Documents responsive to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s November 19, 2020 letter to Secretary Wilbur L. Ross; - Summary report data responsive to specified requests concerning data collection processes, metrics, issues, and improprieties; and - Specified metadata for the defendants’ December 1 and December 8 productions.
The defendants also had to provide appropriate metadata for all future productions. They had to make an additional witness available for a deposition by December 17, 2020, on limited topics concerning document and data retention, organization, collection, review, production, and database search functions. Finally, the defendants had 14 days to respond to the plaintiffs’ interrogatories and requests for admission. Judge Lucy H. Koh’s order addressed discovery and did not decide the underlying Enumeration Clause claim.
Read the full 8-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.