B.R., Plaintiff - Appellee, v. F.C.S.B.; S.T.; A.F.; P.A.H.; T.B.; B.H.; M.P.F.; M.C.; F.T.; J.F.; C.K.; J.O., Defendants - Appellants, and MIKE AND MARY ROES 1-15, Defendants.
No. 21-1005
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT
November 2, 2021
Argued: September 21, 2021
PUBLISHED
NATIONAL WOMEN‘S LAW CENTER AND 51 ADDITIONAL ORGANIZATIONS, Amici Supporting Appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, at Alexandria. Rossie David Alston, Jr., District Judge.
Before GREGORY, Chief Judge, and NIEMEYER and RICHARDSON, Circuit Judges.
Affirmed by published opinion. Judge Niemeyer wrote the opinion, in which Chief Judge Gregory and Judge Richardson joined.
ARGUED: Elbert Lin, HUNTON ANDREWS KURTH LLP, Richmond, Virginia, for Appellants. Tejinder Singh, GOLDSTEIN & RUSSELL, P.C., Bethesda, Maryland, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Michael E. Kinney, MICHAEL E. KINNEY, PLC, Reston, Virginia, for Appellants S.T., A.F., P.A.H., T.B., B.H., M.P., M.C., F.T., and J.F. Sona Rewari, Ryan M. Bates, HUNTON ANDREWS KURTH LLP, Washington, D.C., for Appellant F.C.S.B. Bruce M. Blanchard, James Paul Menzies Miller, ODIN, FELDMAN & PITTLEMAN, PC, Reston, Virginia, for Appellant J.O. James F. Davis, JAMES F. DAVIS, P.C., Fairfax, Virginia, for Appellant C.K. Thomas N. Sweeney, MESSA & ASSOCIATES, P.C., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Daniel H. Woofter, GOLDSTEIN & RUSSELL, P.C., Bethesda, Maryland, for Appellee. Emily Martin, Sunu P. Chandy, Neena Chaudhry, Shiwali Patel, Elizabeth Tang, NATIONAL WOMEN‘S LAW
NIEMEYER, Circuit Judge:
A female plaintiff commenced this action by filing a complaint in which she referred to herself by the pseudonym Jane Doe. In her complaint, she alleged in detail multiple acts of sexual harassment and sexual abuse, including rape, that were directed against her over the course of several months when she was a student at a middle school in Fairfax County, Virginia, and the school‘s inaction to end the offensive conduct when it was ongoing, all of which caused her serious injury. She claimed that the defendants, whom she named, violated her rights under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and other laws. And she explained that she was using a pseudonym to protect her privacy and health.
As the plaintiff alleged, the defendants undoubtedly knew the plaintiff‘s identity from the extensive details included in the 40-page complaint. Nonetheless, they filed motions to dismiss on the ground that the plaintiff‘s failure to provide her true name to the court had deprived it of subject-matter jurisdiction and that this jurisdictional flaw could no longer be remedied because the statute of limitations for the plaintiff‘s federal claims had lapsed a few days after she filed her complaint. In response, the plaintiff disclosed her true name to the court and requested that she be allowed to proceed under a pseudonym. The district court denied the defendants’ jurisdictional motions, and, because the sensitive nature of the allegations warranted “the utmost level of privacy,” it allowed the action to proceed pseudonymously. The court explained that while the plaintiff had not adhered to
We agree with the district court and affirm.
I
On July 12, 2019, shortly before her 20th birthday, the plaintiff commenced this action, alleging in her complaint that from October 2011 through February 2012, when she was a seventh-grade student at Rachel Carson Middle School in Fairfax County, Virginia, she was repeatedly “raped, sexually assaulted, sexually harassed, terrorized, extorted, bullied, and threatened with death by other students.” She described the offensive conduct in detail and alleged that despite her “specific and repeated complaints to [school] administrators about the horrific environment and the discrimination she suffered,” the officials “deflected, minimized, and ignored [her] serious complaints,” leading her to suffer “life-altering trauma.” She asserted claims under Title IX,
The plaintiff did not include her name in the complaint, using instead the fictitious name Jane Doe, and she did not seek leave of court to do so. She explained in her complaint that while she was using a “fictitious
The defendants filed motions to dismiss the complaint pursuant to
In response, the plaintiff filed an amended complaint and a motion for leave to proceed under a pseudonym. She attached affidavits, filed under seal, disclosing her real name to the court for the first time. The defendants filed motions to strike and dismiss the amended complaint, arguing that the amended complaint‘s federal claims were untimely and that any order authorizing the plaintiff to proceed pseudonymously would not “relate back” for limitations purposes to the date she filed her original complaint because the court never had subject-matter jurisdiction over that complaint.
Following a hearing, the court, by order dated March 10, 2020, denied the defendants’ motions to dismiss the Title IX claim and granted the plaintiff‘s motion to proceed pseudonymously. It rejected the defendants’ argument that the plaintiff‘s federal claims were barred by the statute of limitations, disagreeing with the premise that the “Plaintiff‘s failure to provide her name in her Original Complaint [was] a jurisdictional defect.” It also agreed that the “highly sensitive and . . . immensely personal nature” of the allegations “warrant[ed] the utmost level of privacy.” Indeed, it noted that because of “the seriousness of the alleged offenses and the wide-ranging ramifications” that the allegations might hold for all the parties, it was “necessary to not only protect the privacy interests of the accuser, but also the accused.” The court accordingly ordered “that, from this point forward, in this litigation, each party will be referred to by . . . initials.” Thus, the plaintiff became “B.R.” (to whom we refer less impersonally with the arbitrarily assigned fictitious name of “Kate“). The court recognized Kate‘s violation of
On the defendants’ motion, the district court included in its order a
II
At the heart of the defendants’ argument is the contention that because Kate filed her complaint using a pseudonym, the district court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction over the action. According to the defendants, a “district court‘s jurisdiction does not attach unless and until a plaintiff tells the court who she is.” This is so, they maintain, because “the scope of
For support, the defendants rely on three nineteenth-century treatises, as well as an 1876 decision from the Indiana Supreme Court, for the proposition that early “American practitioners followed the ‘general rule’ that the initial pleading must identify” the parties by their true names. (Citing 1 Joseph Chitty & Thomas Chitty, A Treatise on the Parties to Actions, and on Pleading 244-45 (8th Am. ed. 1840) (“The general rule is, that the declaration should pursue the writ in regard to the [C]hristian and surnames of the parties“); James Gould, A Treatise on the Principles of Pleading, in Civil Actions 86 (3d ed. 1849) (“The parties should be described by their proper names for the purpose of identifying them. And no other form of description, it seems, can supply the omission of their proper names“); Edwin E. Bryant, The Law of Pleading under the Codes of Civil Procedure 182 (1894) (“The full, true Christian and surnames of all the parties plaintiff and defendant should be given” in the title of the complaint); and Pollock v. Dunning, 54 Ind. 115, 117-18 (1876) (holding that “an unincorporated company can not sue in the name of their firm, but must proceed in the individual names of their members” based on the “settled” “principle . . . that in all actions the writ and declaration must both set forth, accurately, the [C]hristian and surname of each plaintiff and each defendant, unless the party is a corporation” (cleaned up))). Relying on this history, the defendants reason that there is no “Case” or “Controversy” within the meaning of
While Kate contends that the limitations period for her Title IX claim is longer, she points out that we need not resolve that dispute because even under the two-year limitations period advanced by the defendants, her Title IX claim, as alleged in her original complaint, was indisputably timely. She argues that her filing of her original complaint pseudonymously without disclosing her real name to the court “has nothing to do with jurisdiction.” Instead, she contends, her complaint properly invoked the court‘s jurisdiction by “plead[ing] the facts necessary to establish [her]
The issue presented by the parties in this interlocutory appeal, therefore, is whether Kate‘s failure to disclose her true name to the district court when she filed her complaint deprived the district court of subject-matter jurisdiction. To address this, we begin with some fundamentals.
Although the term “jurisdiction” has been used somewhat loosely on occasion in the past, it is now well established that it refers to “the courts’ statutory or constitutional power to adjudicate the case.” United States v. Cotton, 535 U.S. 625, 630 (2002) (quoting Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Env‘t, 523 U.S. 83, 89 (1998)). “Without jurisdiction the court cannot proceed at all in any cause. Jurisdiction is power to declare the law, and when it ceases to exist, the only function remaining to the court is that of announcing the fact and dismissing the cause.” Steel Co., 523 U.S. at 94 (quoting Ex parte McCardle, 7 Wall. 506, 514 (1868)). Moreover, few, if any, precepts are more fundamental than that “‘federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction,’ constrained to exercise only the authority [1] conferred by
Congress, of course, granted original jurisdiction to district courts over “all civil actions arising under the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States.”
Under
Article III , federal courts do not adjudicate hypothetical or abstract disputes. Federal courts do not possess a roving commission to publicly opine on every legal question. Federal courts do not exercise general legal oversight of the Legislative and Executive Branches, or of private entities. And federal courts do not issue advisory opinions. As Madison explained in Philadelphia, federal courts instead decide only matters “of a Judiciary Nature.” 2 Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, p. 430 (M. Farrand ed. 1966).In sum, under
Article III , a federal court may resolve only “a real controversy with real impact on real persons.”
TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 141 S. Ct. 2190, 2203 (2021) (emphasis added) (citation omitted).
In short, the cases and controversies that
Based on these principles, we have no difficulty concluding that when Kate filed her complaint in July 2019, her civil action qualified as a “Case” or “Controversy” within the meaning of
Thus, when considering the components of what constitutes an
The defendants’ principal and perhaps only argument to counter this conclusion focuses on historical pleading practice. The defendants emphasize the Supreme Court‘s recognition that “a century‘s worth of precedent and practice in American courts” can inform whether a particular rule is jurisdictional, Sebelius v. Auburn Regional Med. Ctr., 568 U.S. 145, 155 (2013) (cleaned up), as well as its statement that ”
To be sure, in analyzing whether a plaintiff possesses the requisite personal interest to make a dispute qualify as a “Case,” the Court has indeed “look[ed] to the . . . common law.” Uzuegbunam, 141 S. Ct. at 797-98; see id. at 801-02 (holding that “[b]ecause nominal damages were available at common law in analogous circumstances, . . . a request for nominal damages satisfies the redressability element of standing where a plaintiff‘s claim is based on a completed violation of a legal right“); see also Vt. Agency, 529 U.S. at 774 (relying on “the long tradition of qui tam actions in England and the American Colonies” to conclude “that the United States’ injury in fact suffices to confer standing on” a relator). But the fact that the Court regularly relies on the common law in analyzing standing, an established
Moreover, while it may be true that “pseudonymous plaintiffs were once a rarity,” In re U.S. Off. of Pers. Mgmt. Data Sec. Breach Litig., 928 F.3d 42, 81 (D.C. Cir. 2019) (Williams, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part), it is also undoubtedly true that the practice has become increasingly common over the last 50 years. And during that time period, the Supreme Court has never suggested that a case or controversy does not exist if a plaintiff sues under a pseudonym without first revealing her true name to the court.
Indeed, it has suggested the contrary. In addressing justiciability in Roe v. Wade, the Court noted that the plaintiff had filed her complaint under a pseudonym in March 1970 and had “filed an alias affidavit with the District Court” in May of that year. 410 U.S. 113, 124 (1973). Yet, “[d]espite the use of the pseudonym,” the Court observed that “no suggestion [had been] made that Roe [was] a fictitious person,” and it “accept[ed] as true, and as established, her existence,” as well as “her pregnant state, as of the inception of her suit” and “her inability to obtain a legal abortion in Texas.” Id. Having accepted those allegations as true, the Court observed further that “[v]iewing Roe‘s case as of the time of its filing . . . , there can be little dispute that it then presented a case or controversy.” Id. (emphasis added). To be sure, the justiciability issue addressed by the Court was not the effect of the pseudonymous filing but whether Roe‘s case had become moot during the course of the litigation when she was no longer pregnant. Id. at 124-25. But even so, the Court expressly remarked on the plaintiff‘s “use of [a] pseudonym” — and her filing of an “alias affidavit” two months after she filed the complaint — before concluding that “she presented a justiciable controversy.” Id.; see also Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179, 186-87 (1973) (concluding that it followed from Roe that “Doe presents a justiciable controversy,” even though when “[a]n offer of proof” was made as to Doe‘s identity, the district court had “deemed it unnecessary to receive that proof” (emphasis added)). These Supreme Court cases thus support our conclusion that the use, vel non, of pseudonyms in pleading is immaterial to the case or controversy inquiry.
We are also not persuaded by the defendants’ additional argument that a plaintiff‘s disclosure of her identity to the court should be treated as jurisdictional because it is necessary to ensure that a real person, not a phantom, stands behind the complaint. When Kate filed her pseudonymous complaint, she alleged that she was a real person — “an adult individual and citizen of the United States.” Of course, should that allegation prove to be false, there are remedies available. See, e.g.,
Notwithstanding our conclusion that Kate‘s pseudonymous filing had nothing to do with the district court‘s jurisdiction, we do not intend to trivialize the importance of complying with
Yet, while pseudonymous litigation thus implicates the “customary and constitutionally-embedded presumption of openness in judicial proceedings,” Doe v. Stegall, 653 F.2d 180, 186 (5th Cir. 1981), we reject the suggestion that a plaintiff‘s failure to disclose her name to the court at the outset of the litigation denies the court the power to resolve the dispute. Rather, a district court that possesses jurisdiction over such an action — and thus has not just the power but the “virtually unflagging” duty “to hear and decide” it, Lexmark Int‘l, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., 572 U.S. 118, 126 (2014) (cleaned up) — also possesses, as a corollary, the inherent power to require the plaintiff to identify herself under seal to the court and to the defendants. See ACLU v. Holder, 673 F.3d 245, 256 (4th Cir. 2011) (recognizing that the “core
AFFIRMED.