Poorsina v. Tseng
- Vince Chhabria
- 3:20-cv-09122
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 3
In Poorsina v. Tseng, Judge Chhabria denied Poorsina’s motions for reconsideration and default judgment because service and clerk’s default requirements were unmet.
Ali R. Poorsina’s requests for reconsideration and default judgment were denied. The defendants were not placed in default, and the case was not resolved by default judgment.
What happened
In Poorsina v. Tseng, Ali R. Poorsina, who represented himself, sued Tan Tseng and three other defendants. The court had previously set aside defaults against three defendants because service was ineffective and had not entered default against the fourth.
Poorsina later asked the court to reconsider its earlier denial of default judgment, or to enter default judgment based on service completed afterward. The court said later service could not change whether the earlier decision was correct. It also said default judgment could not be entered because the clerk had not entered default, and the defendants’ response was not yet due when Poorsina filed the motion.
The court denied both motions and terminated the related docket entries. The order is attributed in the supplied case information to Judge Vince Chhabria.
The detailed version
- Poorsina v. Tseng · No. 3:20-cv-09122
- Vince Chhabria
- May 18, 2022
Background
Ali R. Poorsina, proceeding without a lawyer, sued Tan Tseng, Terrenz Kukant Cam, Boi Anh Hong, and Kevin Tu Cam. In an earlier order, the court set aside the clerk’s entries of default against Tseng, T.K. Cam, and Hong because service was ineffective. No default had been entered against K.T. Cam. The court also denied Poorsina’s earlier request for default judgment and directed him to complete service within 30 days.
Poorsina then filed a document seeking what he described as default judgment and challenging the earlier order. The court treated that filing as seeking reconsideration of the earlier denial based on later service. Poorsina also filed a second document that appeared to be a proposed order granting default judgment rather than a properly presented motion.
Court’s reasoning
The court explained that reconsideration under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 59(e) may be available for newly discovered evidence, but new evidence must be capable of changing the earlier result. The court had correctly denied the earlier default-judgment request because the defendants had not been properly served at that time. Service completed later, in response to the court’s directive, could not change whether the earlier decision was correct.
The court separately considered whether Poorsina was seeking default judgment anew. It explained that default judgment generally requires two steps: the clerk must first enter default, and the court may then consider a request for judgment. Here, the clerk had not entered default against the defendants. Even assuming the January 14 service was effective, the defendants’ response was not due when Poorsina filed the motion. The court also noted that K.T. Cam had appeared and that the defendants had filed a motion to dismiss.
Disposition
The court denied Poorsina’s motions for reconsideration of the earlier denial of default judgment and/or for default judgment anew. It terminated Docket Nos. 69 and 75. The supplied case information identifies Judge Vince Chhabria, while the extracted signature block appears to reference Richard Seeborg signing for Saundra B. Armstrong; the judge attribution therefore warrants review.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.