Lewis v. State Farm
- Philip Halpern
- 7:23-cv-08089
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Lewis v. State Farm, Judge Swain denied Lewis’s request to amend as unnecessary and ordered the missing complaint page added.
Regina Lewis is affected because her amendment request was denied as unnecessary and fee-free status was denied for an appeal. The Clerk of Court was directed to add the missing complaint page to the docket. The opinion does not decide the underlying claims against State Farm or John W. Owens.
What happened
Regina Lewis filed this case without a lawyer and asked to proceed without paying the filing fee. The court had previously believed that her one-page complaint lacked a signature and directed her to submit a signed complaint.
Lewis responded that she had originally submitted a signed, two-page complaint and asked to amend it because she no longer had the original. The court clerk then found that both pages had been submitted but that the second page had not been scanned into the docket.
The court denied Lewis’s request to amend as unnecessary and directed the clerk to add both pages to the docket. Judge Laura Taylor Swain also ruled that an appeal would not be taken in good faith and denied fee-free status for an appeal.
The detailed version
- Lewis v. State Farm · No. 7:23-cv-08089
- Philip Halpern
- Mar. 18, 2024
Background
Regina Lewis filed the action without a lawyer and sought permission to proceed without paying the filing fee. The court initially believed that Lewis had filed a one-page complaint without a signature. On February 29, 2024, it directed her to submit a one-page complaint bearing an original signature within 30 days.
Lewis responded with a letter stating that she had originally submitted a signed, two-page complaint. She said she no longer had the original complaint and asked for permission to amend it.
Court’s Analysis
The court stated that, in response to Lewis’s letter, the Clerk of Court reviewed her original submission. The clerk discovered that Lewis had submitted a two-page complaint with an original signature, but that both pages of the double-sided complaint had not been scanned and uploaded to the docket.
Because the problem resulted from the docket not including both pages—not from a defect requiring Lewis to amend her complaint—the court determined that her request to amend was unnecessary.
Ruling
The court denied Lewis’s request to amend her complaint as unnecessary. It directed the Clerk of Court to modify the docket entry for the original complaint to include both pages.
The court also certified under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(a)(3) that an appeal from the order would not be taken in good faith. As a result, it denied permission to proceed without paying the filing fee for purposes of an appeal. The order did not decide the underlying claims against the defendants.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.