Dame Products v. Metropolitan Transit Authority
- P. Castel
- 1:19-cv-05649
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 6
In Dame Products v. Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Judge Castel scheduled a discovery conference without deciding the proposed motion to compel.
Dame Products and the defendants, including The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, were affected because the court scheduled a conference concerning Dame’s proposed request for additional discovery.
What happened
Dame Products sued The Metropolitan Transportation Authority after it rejected advertisements for Dame’s sex-related products under the Authority’s advertising policy. The opinion text concerns a dispute over additional advertisements that Dame submitted after filing the lawsuit.
Dame sought a conference and planned to ask the court to require defendants to provide further answers to requests for admission about those additional advertisements. Defendants argued that the requests concerned advertisements the Authority had not reviewed and improperly sought hypothetical legal analysis and privileged information.
Judge P. Kevin Castel scheduled a discovery conference for February 2, 2021, at 10:30 a.m. The text does not show that Judge Castel ruled on whether defendants had to provide further responses or decided the lawsuit’s constitutional issues.
The detailed version
- Dame Products v. Metropolitan Transit Authority · No. 1:19-cv-05649
- P. Castel
- Jan. 22, 2021
Background
Dame Products challenged The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s rejection of advertisements containing messages such as “Toys, For Sex” and “Thank you from the bottom of my vulva.” According to the defendants’ letter, the Authority rejected those advertisements under section B.16 of its Advertising Policy, which bars advertisements from a “sexually oriented business.” The letter states that Dame alleged the rejection was unconstitutional, including because it discriminated against viewpoints concerning female sexuality. The text provided does not contain a decision on those constitutional claims.
After the lawsuit was filed, Dame submitted different advertisements for products called “Pillo” and “Alu.” The defendants’ letter states that the Authority’s advertising contractor did not forward those advertisements to the Authority, and that the Authority therefore had not formally reviewed them. Dame later sought answers to a second set of requests for admission. Requests for admission are discovery requests generally used to establish undisputed facts or the application of law to facts.
Parties’ Positions
Dame asked the court to schedule a discovery conference and planned to seek an order requiring defendants to provide further responses to the second requests for admission. The letter states that Dame wanted the responses as evidence concerning the constitutionality of the defendants’ conduct.
The defendants opposed that request. They argued that the requests asked the Authority to predict how its policy would apply to advertisements it had not reviewed, called for legal conclusions, and sought attorney-client, work-product, and deliberative-process-protected information. The defendants asked that any motion to compel further responses be denied.
Court’s Action
The text shows that Judge P. Kevin Castel scheduled a discovery conference for February 2, 2021, at 10:30 a.m. It does not show a ruling granting or denying a motion to compel, a ruling on the second requests for admission, or a decision on the merits of Dame’s constitutional claims. The disposition reflected in the provided text is therefore the scheduling of a discovery conference, not a merits ruling.
Read the full 6-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.