Rodriguez v. Doral Mortg. Corp., 94-2227

• Decision Date: 04 April 1995
• Docket Number: No. 94-2227,94-2227
• Citation: 57 F.3d 1168
• Parties: 68 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. (BNA) 331, 64 USLW 2021, 32 Fed.R.Serv.3d 39 Nydia G. RODRIGUEZ, a/k/a Nydia G. Rodriguez Bruno, Plaintiff, Appellee, v. DORAL MORTGAGE CORP., Defendant, Appellant. . Heard
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 1168

57 F.3d 1168

68 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. (BNA) 331, 64 USLW 2021,

32 Fed.R.Serv.3d 39

Nydia G. RODRIGUEZ, a/k/a Nydia G. Rodriguez Bruno Plaintiff, Appellee, v. DORAL MORTGAGE CORP., Defendant, Appellant.

No. 94-2227.

United States Court of Appeals First Circuit.

Heard April 4, 1995.

Decided June 23, 1995.

Radames A. Torruella, with whom Carmencita Velazquez-Marquez and McConnell Valdes, Hato Rey, PR, were on brief, for appellant.

Erick Morales-Perez, Bayamon, PR, with whom Humberto Ramirez, Austin, TX, was on brief, for appellee.

Before SELYA, CYR and STAHL, Circuit Judges.

SELYA, Circuit Judge.

This appeal invites us to explore, and in turn to demarcate, the outer boundaries of a promontory of federal judicial power. At the base of the appeal is a sexual harassment suit brought by Nydia G. Rodriguez Bruno (Rodriguez) against her former employer, Doral Mortgage Corporation (Doral). ¹ Premising jurisdiction on the assertion of a federal civil rights violation, see 28 U.S.C. Secs. 1331, 1343(a)(4), the plaintiff pressed a claim under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. Secs. 2000e to 2000e-17 (1988), and hitched to it a pendent claim under a Puerto Rico statute known colloquially as Law 100. ² After first holding that the amendments embodied in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, Pub.L. No. 102-166, 105 Stat. 1071 (1991) (codified as amended at scattered sections of 42 U.S.C.), did not apply to this case in light of Landgraf v. USI Film Prods., --- U.S. ----, 114 S.Ct. 1483, 128 L.Ed.2d 229 (1994), the district court rejected each of the plaintiff's pleaded claims. The court nonetheless entered judgment in her favor based on Law 17, P.R.Laws Ann. tit. 29, Secs. 155-155(l ) (Supp.1992) ³--and did so notwithstanding that the plaintiff had neither pleaded a cause of action thereunder nor invoked the statute at trial.

Three questions are now before us. (1) May a district court enter judgment for a plaintiff on a cause of action that was neither pleaded in the complaint nor raised during the course of trial? (2) May a district court prior to the close of trial unilaterally introduce an unpled cause of action into the proceedings? (3) In any event, may a district court, on remand, assume supplemental jurisdiction over a nonfederal cause of action that could have been introduced during trial, when (a) neither the plaintiff nor the district court in fact introduced the cause of action before the end of the trial, and (b) the foundational federal claim, though originally colorable, has since been repulsed on the merits? Because we answer the first question in the negative, we must vacate the judgment below. ⁴ We turn then to choice of remedy, and, after answering both the second and third questions in the affirmative, we remand for further proceedings.

I. FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY

We begin with the facts as supportably found by the district court after a bench trial. See Rodriguez Bruno v. Doral Mortgage Corp., No. 92-2497, slip op. at 1-9 (D.P.R. Sept. 19, 1994) (D.Ct.Op.). We then proceed to chart the procedural history of the litigation.

Doral hired Rodriguez in March of 1990 as a loan processor and transferred her the following January to its Hato Rey branch. There, she worked as a receptionist under the hegemony of Miguel Berrios. Over a period of several weeks, multiple incidents of sexual harassment occurred, including nonconsensual physical contacts initiated by Berrios. Rodriguez reported the harassment to two of Doral's top executives. These officials assured her that Berrios would be transferred, and, as it turned out, he resigned soon thereafter.

Despite Berrios' departure, Rodriguez filed a complaint with the Puerto Rico Department of Labor in which she charged sexual harassment in consequence of an unlawfully hostile work environment. This grievance ultimately spawned the federal suit. The case was tried to the bench. The judge found the work environment to be "hostile" within the meaning of Title VII, but also found that Doral had neither actual nor constructive notice of the problem prior to Rodriguez' internal complaints. He concluded, therefore, that Doral could not be held liable under Title VII. The judge also ruled that Berrios could not be held liable because Title VII, as it stood before the 1991 amendments, did not impose liability on individual harassers. See D.Ct.Op. at 14. So ended the plaintiff's federal claims.

The court, however, did not consign the plaintiff to the ignominy of unmitigated defeat. Without passing in so many words on the Law 100 claim, the court departed from the pleadings on its own initiative and decided the suit in the plaintiff's favor by recourse to Law 17. Describing Law 17 as a "complementary statute regarding sexual harassment," and interpreting it as "provid[ing] for strict liability where the alleged harasser is a supervisor," id. at 15, the court held Doral liable to Rodriguez for $100,000 in damages, see id. at 19, and entered judgment accordingly. Doral now appeals.

II. THE UNPLEADED CLAIM

We begin our trek through the thicket of controversy by attempting to ascertain whether the lower court's entry of judgment based on Law 17 can be justified from a procedural standpoint. Because the necessary inquiry focuses on the inclusion and exclusion of claims in a civil action in a federal district court, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure govern. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 1; see also 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2072(b); see generally Charles A. Wright, Law of Federal Courts Sec. 62 (5th ed. 1994). The lower court's action in respect to the Law 17 claim implicates no fewer than three of these rules, namely, Rule 8(a), Rule 15(b), and Rule 54(c). We conduct our examination mindful of two precepts: (1) that the Civil Rules cannot conjure up jurisdiction where none otherwise exists, see Fed.R.Civ.P. 82 (admonishing that the Civil Rules "shall not be construed to extend ... the jurisdiction of the United States district courts"); Wendy C. Perdue, Finley v. United States: Unstringing Pendent Jurisdiction, 76 Va.L.Rev. 539, 563 n. 146 (1990) (addressing this limitation), and (2) that apart from the Civil Rules, "the district courts retain the inherent power to do what is necessary and proper to conduct judicial business in a satisfactory manner," Aoude v. Mobil Oil Corp., 892 F.2d 1115, 1119 (1st Cir.1989).

A. Rule 8(a).

Fed.R.Civ.P. 8(a)(2) requires that a complaint contain, inter alia, "a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief...." The mandate of Rule 8(a)(2) comprises a threshold requirement. Despite the admonition that "[a]ll pleadings shall be so construed as to do substantial justice," Fed.R.Civ.P. 8(f), failure to comply with Rule 8(a)(2) may render an unpleaded claim noncognizable when the plaintiff (or the court, for that matter) subsequently teases it out of adduced facts. It would not serve the interests of justice, for instance, to redeem a totally unpleaded, unlitigated claim in circumstances that threaten significant prejudice to a defendant.

The bottom line is simply this: while courts should construe pleadings generously, paying more attention to substance than to form, they must always exhibit awareness of the defendant's inalienable right to know in advance the nature of the cause of action being asserted against him. See Beacon Theatres, Inc. v. Westover, 359 U.S. 500, 506, 79 S.Ct. 948, 954, 3 L.Ed.2d 988 (1959); Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, 47, 78 S.Ct. 99, 102-03, 2 L.Ed.2d 80 (1957); Campana v. Eller, 755 F.2d 212, 215 (1st Cir.1985); Shelter Mut. Ins. Co. v. Public Water Supply Dist. No. 7, 747 F.2d 1195, 1197 (8th Cir.1984). A fundamental purpose of pleadings under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure is to afford the opposing party fair notice of the claims asserted against him and the grounds on which those claims rest. See Torres Ramirez v. Bermudez Garcia, 898 F.2d 224, 227 (1st Cir.1990). Honoring this purpose ensures that cases will "be decided on the merits after an adequate development of the facts." Mayer v. Mylod, 988 F.2d 635, 638 (6th Cir.1993).

In the case at hand, the plaintiff wholly failed to plead a Law 17 claim. Her complaint did not delineate such a claim when filed; she did not add one by formal amendment; she did not mention the statute in her pretrial filings; and she did not explicitly refer to it at any point during the trial. In short, this is not a case in which a properly pleaded legal theory has been obscured by the parties' concentration on other theories, cf. Campana, 755 F.2d at 215, but, rather, a case in which a particular legal theory was never so much as a gleam in the pleader's eye.

It is true, as the district court observed, that the pretrial order referred at one point to "strict liability," the very property with which the district court imbued Law 17. See D.Ct.Op. at 15. Whatever the potential legal significance of this fleeting mention, it is not sufficiently informative to satisfy the "short and plain statement" requirement of Rule 8(a)(2). See, e.g., Campana, 755 F.2d at 215. By like token, it surely did not give Doral fair notice that the plaintiff would assert a claim premised on Law 17 or that the judge would pull one out from beneath his robe, like a rabbit from a magician's hat.

We will not loiter. Though we fully appreciate that a complaint may be constructively amended as a case proceeds, see, e.g., Toth v. USX Corp., 883 F.2d 1297, 1298 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 493 U.S. 994, 110 S.Ct. 544, 107 L.Ed.2d 541 (1989), this principle cannot mean that plaintiffs may leave defendants to forage in forests of facts, searching at their peril for every legal theory that a court may some day find lurking in the penumbra of the record. Under the Civil Rules, notice of a claim is a defendant's entitlement, not a defendant's burden. The truth-seeking function of our adversarial system of justice is disserved when the boundaries of a suit...