motion to compel discovery

In 2007 Norman Carpenter, a former shift supervisor at a Mohawk manufacturing facility, filed suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia alleging that Mohawk had terminated him in violation of 42 U.S.C. §1985(2) and Georgia laws. According to Carpenter’s complaint, his termination followed an e-mail he sent to a member of Mohawk’s human resources department stating that the company was employing undocumented immigrants. At the time Carpenter sent the e-mail, he was unaware that Mohawk stood accused in a pending class-action lawsuit, Williams v. Mohawk Industries, Inc., No. 4:04-cv-00003-HLM (ND Ga., Jan. 6, 2004), of conspiring to drive down the wages of its legal employees by knowingly hiring undocumented workers in violation of federal and state racketeering laws. Company officials directed Carpenter to meet with Mohawk’s retained counsel in the Williams case. Counsel allegedly pressured Carpenter to recant his statements about the company’s hiring practices. When Carpenter refused, Mohawk fired him under what he maintains were false pretenses. After learning of Carpenter’s complaint, the Williams plaintiffs sought an evidentiary hearing to explore his allegations. In its response, Mohawk described Carpenter’s accusations as pure fantasy and recounted the true facts of his dismissal, stating that Carpenter had attempted to have Mohawk hire an undocumented worker, that retained counsel had interviewed him during an immediate investigation, and that the company had terminated him for blatantly violating company policy. While those events unfolded in the Williams case, discovery proceeded in Carpenter’s separate action. Carpenter moved to compel Mohawk to produce information concerning his meeting with retained counsel and the company’s termination decision. Mohawk maintained that the requested information was protected by the attorney-client privilege. The District Court agreed that the privilege applied but granted the motion to compel after concluding that Mohawk had implicitly waived the privilege through its representations in the Williams case. The court declined to certify its order for interlocutory appeal under 28 U.S.C. §1292(b). The court stayed the ruling to allow Mohawk to pursue other appellate avenues, including a petition for mandamus or an appeal under the collateral order doctrine. Mohawk filed a notice of appeal and a petition for a writ of mandamus in the Eleventh Circuit. The Court of Appeals dismissed the appeal for lack of jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. §1291, holding that the District Court’s ruling did not qualify as an immediately appealable collateral order under Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp., 337 U. S. 541. The Eleventh Circuit also denied the mandamus petition. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve a conflict among the Circuits concerning the availability of collateral appeals in the attorney-client privilege context.

Respondent Rhinehart serves as the spiritual leader of the Aquarian Foundation, a religious group with fewer than 1,000 members mostly residing in Washington whose beliefs include life after death and communication with the dead through a medium. Between 1973 and 1979 the Seattle Times and the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin published eleven articles describing Rhinehart's operation of the Foundation, seances in which participants paid to contact deceased relatives, sales of magical stones expelled from his body, a vacated sodomy conviction, an extravaganza at the Walla Walla State Penitentiary that included cash prizes and a chorus line, and an alleged connection to actor Lou Ferrigno. Rhinehart, the Foundation, and five female members who participated in the penitentiary presentation filed suit in Washington Superior Court against the newspapers, the article authors, and the authors' spouses. The complaint alleged that the articles contained fictional and untrue statements that petitioners knew or should have known were false, that the articles held Rhinehart up to public scorn and impeached his honesty, integrity, virtue, religious philosophy, and professional reputation, and that the articles discouraged contributions and diminished the Foundation's financial ability to pursue its purposes; it sought $14,100,000 in damages for defamation and invasions of privacy. Petitioners answered and promptly pursued extensive discovery by deposing Rhinehart, requesting production of documents concerning the financial affairs of Rhinehart and the Foundation, and serving extensive interrogatories. Respondents produced several financial documents including income tax returns but refused to disclose additional financial information, the identities of all donors during the preceding ten years, and a list of members during that period. Petitioners moved under Civil Rule 37 for an order compelling discovery. Respondents opposed the motion on First Amendment grounds and separately moved for a protective order, noting petitioners' stated intention to continue publishing articles and to use discovered information in future articles. The trial court initially granted the motion to compel and denied the protective order without prejudice, but after respondents submitted affidavits detailing threatening letters, telephone calls, attacks, and assaults, the court issued a protective order covering all discovered information pertaining to the financial affairs of the plaintiffs, the names and addresses of Aquarian Foundation members, contributors, or clients, and the names and addresses of those who had been contributors, clients, or donors, prohibiting any use or dissemination except as necessary to prepare for and try the case. Respondents appealed the production order and petitioners appealed the protective order. The Supreme Court of Washington affirmed both orders. The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve a conflict with decisions of the District of Columbia Circuit and the First Circuit.

On June 27, 1991, Police Officer Mary Lu Redmond responded alone to a dispatcher's report of a fight in progress at the Grand Canyon Estates apartment complex in the Village of Hoffman Estates, Illinois. Upon arrival, she learned from two women that there had been a stabbing inside the building and requested backup and an ambulance. As Redmond approached the apartment building, five men ran out the front door yelling and screaming. One of the men was waving a pipe above his head. Almost immediately thereafter, two more men — a Caucasian man followed by an African-American man in hot pursuit — came running out of the door of the building. Officer Redmond testified that she ordered Allen to drop the knife multiple times before firing a single shot when he began the downward motion with the knife. Allen fell to the ground, and a butcher knife was later observed near his body by arriving officers. Allen's siblings who witnessed the event testified that Allen was unarmed at the time of the shooting. After the incident, Officer Redmond sought counseling from Karen Beyer, a licensed clinical social worker employed by the Village, meeting with her two or three times per week for several months. During pretrial discovery, the plaintiffs, who are the surviving family members of Ricky Allen, Sr., learned of the counseling sessions and subpoenaed Beyer for her notes and testimony. The defendants moved to quash the subpoena asserting privilege, but the district court denied the motion, ordered production, and later permitted unrestricted inquiry into the communications. When the defendants did not fully comply, the court instructed the jury that it could presume the notes would be unfavorable to the defendants. The jury returned a verdict awarding $45,000 on the federal claim and $500,000 on the state wrongful death claim. Officer Redmond and the Village appealed the judgment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, raising challenges to the deadly force jury instruction and the refusal to recognize the counseling privilege.

In each of three consolidated cases, an employer and an employee entered into a written contract specifying that disputes arising from the employment relationship would be resolved through individualized arbitration proceedings rather than in court. The agreements in the Ernst & Young case, for example, allowed the employee to select the arbitration provider and permitted the arbitrator to grant any relief a court could grant, but required that claims pertaining to different employees be heard in separate proceedings. After their employment ended, the employees filed suit in federal district court. They asserted claims under the Fair Labor Standards Act for unpaid overtime and related state-law claims, and they sought to litigate those claims on behalf of a nationwide class or collective group of similarly situated employees. In the Ernst & Young matter, junior accountant Stephen Morris filed such a suit after leaving the firm. The employers responded by moving to compel arbitration under the terms of the contracts. District courts in some of the cases granted the motions and ordered the employees to proceed in individual arbitrations. In the Ernst & Young case the district court compelled arbitration, but the Ninth Circuit reversed that order. Parallel proceedings occurred in the Seventh and Fifth Circuits, producing conflicting results on whether the arbitration agreements could be enforced. In 2012 the National Labor Relations Board issued its first decision addressing agreements of this type, concluding that the National Labor Relations Act rendered unlawful any contractual requirement of individualized arbitration. Before that Board decision, courts and the Board's own general counsel had treated such agreements as enforceable. The three cases reached the Supreme Court after the Court granted certiorari in 2017 to resolve the disagreement among the circuits and between the Board and several courts of appeals.