Cummings v. The City of New York

Background

Patricia Cummings’s amended complaint asserted federal claims under the Fourteenth Amendment, 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981, 1983, and 1985, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. It also asserted defamation and false-light claims based on statements about a slavery and Middle Passage lesson she taught to a seventh-grade class at Bronx Middle School 118. The court had previously dismissed the amended complaint as to the defendants who had appeared. The court had also dismissed the false-light claim because the opinion states that New York does not recognize that claim.

The defendants who had not appeared were Angel Martinez, Natasha Capers, Coalition of Educational Justice, Philip Scott, and Advise Media Network. After giving Cummings an opportunity to address whether any claims against those defendants were viable, the court considered the remaining defamation claims.

Jurisdiction over the Remaining Claims

The court held that no federal claims remained. It also found that diversity jurisdiction was unavailable because Cummings was domiciled in Suffolk County, New York, and at least Martinez and Capers were also domiciled in New York. Diversity jurisdiction generally requires all opposing parties to be citizens of different states.

The remaining defamation claims arose from the same general controversy as the dismissed federal claims, so they could qualify for supplemental jurisdiction. Supplemental jurisdiction allows a federal court to hear related state-law claims that are part of the same case as federal claims. But the court decided not to exercise that discretionary jurisdiction after dismissing all claims over which it had original jurisdiction. It emphasized that the case was still at an early stage, the nonmoving defendants had not appeared, and keeping the state-law claims in federal court would require unnecessary decisions about state law.

Motion for Reconsideration

Cummings also asked the court to reconsider its March 26, 2021 dismissal under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 59(e). The court described reconsideration as an extraordinary remedy generally limited to an intervening change in controlling law, genuinely new evidence, or the need to correct clear error or prevent serious injustice.

The court denied the motion. It found that documents Cummings received from the New York City Department of Education on February 26, 2021 were not properly newly discovered because she received them while the dismissal motions were still under consideration but did not bring them to the court’s attention before the March 26 decision. The court also concluded that, even if it considered the documents, they did not cure the deficiencies in her due-process, fraud, or defamation theories. Among other things, the court stated that the alleged defamatory statements supporting Cummings’s due-process theory were made by media defendants rather than state actors, and that reports about allegations leading to a government investigation were protected under Section 74 of the New York Civil Rights Law.

Disposition

Judge Colleen McMahon dismissed the claims against Scott, Advise Media Network, Martinez, Capers, and Coalition of Educational Justice without prejudice to refiling them in a court of competent jurisdiction. The court denied Cummings’s motion for reconsideration and directed the clerk to close that motion.