Swanson v. Citibank

• Decision Date: 30 July 2010
• Docket Number: No. 10-1122.,10-1122.
• Citation: 614 F.3d 400
• Parties: Gloria E. SWANSON, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CITIBANK, N.A., et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

614 F.3d 400

Gloria E. SWANSON, Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.CITIBANK, N.A., et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 10-1122.

United States Court of Appeals,Seventh Circuit.

Submitted May 26, 2010. ^*

Decided July 30, 2010.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED.

Gloria E. Swanson, Chicago, IL, pro se.

Charles M. Routen, Chicago, IL, pro se.

Abram I. Moore, Attorney, K&L Gates LLP, Robert M. Chemers, Attorney, Pretzel & Stouffer, Chicago, IL, for Defendants-Appellees.

Before EASTERBROOK, Chief Judge, and POSNER and WOOD, Circuit Judges.

WOOD, Circuit Judge.

Gloria Swanson sued Citibank, Andre Lanier, and Lanier's employer, PCI Appraisal Services, because she believed that all three had discriminated against her on the basis of her race (African-American) when Citibank turned down her application for a home-equity loan. Swanson also named her husband, Charles Routen, as a co-plaintiff and a co-appellant but since Swanson is proceeding pro se, she may not represent her husband. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 11(a); Malone v. Nielson, 474 F.3d 934, 937 (7th Cir.2007). We have therefore dismissed Routen as a party on appeal; we proceed solely with respect to Swanson's part of the case. She was unsuccessful in the district court, which dismissed in response to the defendants' motion under Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6).

Swanson based her complaint on the following set of events, which we accept as true for purposes of this appeal. Hemi Group, LLC v. City of New York, N.Y., --- U.S. ----, 130 S.Ct. 983, 986-87, --- L.Ed.2d ---- (2010). In February 2009 Citibank announced a plan to make loans using funds that it had received from the federal government's Troubled Assets Relief Program. Encouraged by this prospect, Swanson went to a Citibank branch to apply for a home-equity loan. A representative named Skertich told Swanson that she could not apply alone, because she owned her home jointly with her husband; he had to be present as well. Swanson was skeptical, suspecting that Skertich's demand was a ploy to discourage loan applications from African-Americans. She therefore asked to speak to a manager. When the manager joined the group, Swanson disclosed to both Skertich and the manager that Washington Mutual Bank previously had denied her a home-equity loan. The manager warned Swanson that, although she did not want to discourage Swanson from applying for the loan, Citibank's loan criteria were more stringent than those of other banks.

Still interested, Swanson took a loan application home and returned the next day with the necessary information. She was again assisted by Skertich, who entered the information that Swanson had furnished into the computer. When he reached a question regarding race, Skertich told Swanson that she was not required to respond. At some point during this exchange, Skertich pointed to a photograph on his desk and commented that his wife and son were part African-American.

A few days later Citibank conditionally approved Swanson for a home-equity loan of $50,000. It hired Andre Lanier, who worked for PCI Appraisal Services, to visit Swanson's home for an onsite appraisal. Although Swanson had estimated in her loan application that her house was worth $270,000, Lanier appraised it at only $170,000. The difference was critical: Citibank turned down the loan and explained that its conditional approval had been based on the higher valuation. Two months later Swanson paid for and obtained an appraisal from Midwest Valuations, which thought her home was worth $240,000.

Swanson saw coordinated action in this chain of events, and so she filed a complaint (later amended) charging that Citibank, Lanier, and PCI disfavor providing home-equity loans to African-Americans, and so they deliberately lowered the appraised value of her home far below its actual market value, so that they would have an excuse to deny her the loan. She charges that in so doing, they violated the Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. § 3605, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1691(a)(1). The district court granted the defendants' motions to dismiss both theories. It relied heavily on Latimore v. Citibank Fed. Savings Bank, 151 F.3d 712 (7th Cir.1998), a case in which this court described the evidence required to defeat a defense motion for summary judgment on a credit discrimination claim. Initially, the court liberally construed Swanson's complaint to include a common-law fraud claim and declined to dismiss that aspect of the case. Later, however, the defendants moved to dismiss the fraud claim as well, and the district court granted the motion on the grounds that the statements on which Swanson relied were too indefinite and her reliance was unreasonable. This appeal followed.

Before turning to the particulars of Swanson's case, a brief review of the standards that apply to dismissals for failure to state a claim is in order. It is by now well established that a plaintiff must do better than putting a few words on paper that, in the hands of an imaginative reader, might suggest that something has happened to her that might be redressed by the law. Cf. Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, 45-46, 78 S.Ct. 99, 2 L.Ed.2d 80 (1957), disapproved by Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 563, 127 S.Ct. 1955, 167 L.Ed.2d 929 (2007) (“after puzzling the profession for 50 years, this famous observation [the ‘no set of facts' language] has earned its retirement”). The question with which courts are still struggling is how much higher the Supreme Court meant to set the bar, when it decided not only Twombly, but also Erickson v. Pardus, 551 U.S. 89, 127 S.Ct. 2197, 167 L.Ed.2d 1081 (2007), and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, --- U.S. ----, 129 S.Ct. 1937, 173 L.Ed.2d 868 (2009). This is not an easy question to answer, as the thoughtful dissent from this opinion demonstrates. On the one hand, the Supreme Court has adopted a “plausibility” standard, but on the other hand, it has insisted that it is not requiring fact pleading, nor is it adopting a single pleading standard to replace Rule 8, Rule 9, and specialized regimes like the one in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (“PSLRA”), 15 U.S.C. § 78u-4(b)(2).

Critically, in none of the three recent decisions- Twombly, Erickson, or Iqbal-did the Court cast any doubt on the validity of Rule 8 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. To the contrary: at all times it has said that it is interpreting Rule 8, not tossing it out the window. It is therefore useful to begin with a look at the language of the rule: (a) Claim for Relief. A pleading that states a claim for relief must contain:

* * *

(2) a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief....

Fed.R.Civ.P. 8(a)(2). As one respected treatise put it in 2004,

all that is necessary is that the claim for relief be stated with brevity, conciseness, and clarity.... [T]his portion of Rule 8 indicates that a basic objective of the rules is to avoid civil cases turning on technicalities and to require that the pleading discharge the function of giving the opposing party fair notice of the nature and basis or grounds of the pleader's claim and a general indication of the type of litigation that is involved....

5 Charles A. Wright & Arthur R. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 1215 at 165-173 (3d ed. 2004).

Nothing in the recent trio of cases has undermined these broad principles. As Erickson underscored, “[s]pecific facts are not necessary.” 551 U.S. at 93, 127 S.Ct. 2197. The Court was not engaged in a sub rosa campaign to reinstate the old fact-pleading system called for by the Field Code or even more modern codes. We know that because it said so in Erickson: “the statement need only give the defendant fair notice of what the ... claim is and the grounds upon which it rests.” Id. Instead, the Court has called for more careful attention to be given to several key questions: what, exactly, does it take to give the opposing party “fair notice”; how much detail realistically can be given, and should be given, about the nature and basis or grounds of the claim; and in what way is the pleader expected to signal the type of litigation that is being put before the court?

This is the light in which the Court's references in Twombly, repeated in Iqbal, to the pleader's responsibility to “state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face” must be understood. See Twombly, 550 U.S. at 570, 127 S.Ct. 1955; Iqbal, 129 S.Ct. at 1949. “Plausibility” in this context does not imply that the district court should decide whose version to believe, or which version is more likely than not. Indeed, the Court expressly distanced itself from the latter approach in Iqbal, “the plausibility standard is not akin to a probability requirement.” 129 S.Ct. at 1949 (quotation marks omitted). As we understand it, the Court is saying instead that the plaintiff must give enough details about the subject-matter of the case to present a story that holds together. In other words, the court will ask itself could these things have happened, not did they happen. For cases governed only by Rule 8, it is not necessary to stack up inferences side by side and allow the case to go forward only if the plaintiff's inferences seem more compelling than the opposing inferences. Compare Makor Issues & Rights, Ltd. v. Tellabs Inc., 513 F.3d 702, 705 (7th Cir.2008) (applying PSLRA standards).

The Supreme Court's explicit decision to reaffirm the validity of Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N.A., 534 U.S. 506, 122 S.Ct. 992, 152 L.Ed.2d 1 (2002), which was cited with approval in Twombly, 550 U.S. at 556, 127 S.Ct. 1955, indicates that in many straightforward cases, it will not be any more difficult today for a plaintiff to meet that burden than it was before the Court's recent decisions. A plaintiff who believes that she has been passed over for a promotion because of her sex will be able to plead that she was employed by Company X, that a promotion was offered, that she applied and was...