Halkitis v. New York City Department Of Education
- Jesse Furman
- 1:19-cv-11753
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 3
In Halkitis v. New York City Department of Education, Judge Furman granted Halkitis’s motion to compel discovery.
Halkitis obtained an order compelling the defendants to answer Interrogatories 3, 6, and 8 within one week. The order required the defendants to provide those discovery responses but did not decide the underlying employment-discrimination claims.
What happened
Halkitis v. New York City Department of Education involved Halkitis’s request for answers to three discovery questions about discrimination and harassment complaints at the Wagner School.
The defendants objected that the questions were improper, unclear, overly broad, burdensome, irrelevant, and sought private information about people who were not parties. Halkitis argued that the information could identify potential witnesses and was relevant to the employment-discrimination claims.
Judge Jesse M. Furman found the defendants’ arguments without merit and granted Halkitis’s motion to compel. He ordered the defendants to answer the three interrogatories within one week.
The detailed version
- Halkitis v. New York City Department Of Education · No. 1:19-cv-11753
- Jesse Furman
- Nov. 13, 2020
Background
Halkitis filed a letter motion asking the court to compel the defendants to provide discovery responses. The disputed requests were Interrogatories 3, 6, and 8.
Interrogatory 3 asked whether personnel at the Wagner School had complained of harassment or discrimination based on sex, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity between September 1, 2017, and June 30, 2019, and requested the names of complainants and the dates of their complaints.
Interrogatory 6 asked about administrative, judicial, or quasi-judicial matters involving the New York City Department of Education or the individual defendants concerning employment-law violations, discrimination, harassment, or retaliation at the Wagner School from September 1, 2015, to the present. The defendants stated that, while preserving their objections, they would conduct a reasonable search for certain information and produce nonprivileged information if they found it.
Interrogatory 8 asked the defendants to identify Department of Education officers, employees, or agents alleged to have committed discrimination involving sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, or gender identity at the Wagner School from September 1, 2015, to the present.
Parties’ arguments
The defendants objected that the interrogatories exceeded the limits of Local Civil Rule 33 and were vague, ambiguous, overly broad, unduly burdensome, irrelevant, disproportionate to the needs of the case, and invasive of nonparties’ privacy. Halkitis argued that the requests sought the names of potential witnesses and information relevant to whether other employees were similarly situated and to a hostile-work-environment claim. Halkitis also argued that an existing confidentiality order addressed the privacy concern.
The defendants did not file an opposition by the deadline set in the court’s prior order. The court nevertheless reviewed the defendants’ arguments as described in the motion papers.
Ruling
Judge Jesse M. Furman found the defendants’ arguments to be without merit. The court granted Halkitis’s motion to compel and ordered the defendants to respond to the three interrogatories at issue within one week of November 13, 2020. The Clerk of Court was directed to terminate ECF No. 32.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.