Allen v. City of New York
- Jesse Furman
- 1:19-cv-03786
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Allen v. City of New York, Judge Furman denied the motion to strike a sur-reply and denied Plaintiffs’ request to file another one.
Plaintiffs and Defendants New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation and the City of New York; the rulings concerned Plaintiffs’ sur-replies and Defendants’ motion to strike.
What happened
In Allen v. City of New York, Defendants asked the court to remove Plaintiffs’ January 5, 2024 submission from the docket, arguing that it was an unauthorized sur-reply containing new legal arguments.
The court denied Defendants’ motion to strike. It did not decide whether the existing sur-reply was proper or whether five arguments in it were raised for the first time in Defendants’ reply and therefore should not be considered.
Judge Furman also denied Plaintiffs’ request to file another sur-reply and directed the Clerk to terminate the motion to strike, ECF No. 125.
The detailed version
- Allen v. City of New York · No. 1:19-cv-03786
- Jesse Furman
- Jan. 30, 2024
Background
Defendants New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation and the City of New York asked the court to strike Plaintiffs’ January 5, 2024 submission, identified as ECF No. 124. Defendants argued that the submission was effectively a sur-reply—a response filed after a reply brief—and that Plaintiffs had filed it without first obtaining the court’s permission. The submission concerned the parties’ pending summary-judgment motions.
Rulings
The court denied Defendants’ motion to strike. The court reserved judgment on whether Plaintiffs’ sur-reply was proper and on whether five arguments identified in Plaintiffs’ January 5 letter had been raised for the first time in Defendants’ reply and therefore should not be considered.
The court stated that Plaintiffs had already filed what was, for practical purposes, a sur-reply without authorization and that the letter contained several substantive responses to the five identified arguments. The court nevertheless denied Plaintiffs’ separate request to file another sur-reply, identified as ECF No. 126. The Clerk was directed to terminate ECF No. 125, the motion to strike.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.