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Civil Procedure – summary judgment

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//October 15, 2014//

Civil Procedure – summary judgment

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//October 15, 2014//

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U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit

Civil

Civil Procedure – summary judgment

Where the plaintiff offered no excuse for failing to timely file a response to a motion for summary judgment, summary judgment is affirmed.

“Against a rule of attribution the plaintiff cites Hill v. United States, 762 F.3d 589, 591 (7th Cir. 2014), where after noting that ‘ordinarily … the pratfalls of a party’s lawyer are imputed to the party,’ we said that ‘given the unusual gravity of the plaintiff’s injuries, the absence of any suggestion of prejudice to the defendant from the delay in suing, and the district judge’s cursory treatment of the issue of equitable tolling, we have decided that the judgment should be vacated and the case remanded to the district court for further consideration of the tolling issue.’ It was an unusual case. The plaintiff, suing under the Federal Tort Claims Act in respect of prison violence that had cost him one eye and greatly impaired the vision in his other eye and that he attributed to the negligence of the Bureau of Prisons, had recently been evicted from the halfway house to which he had been consigned upon his release from prison and had failed to notify the court of his new address. The district court denied the plaintiff’s plea of equitable tolling not because of his lawyer’s delay in filing suit but because of the plaintiff’s failure to keep the court advised of his changes of address. So while the plaintiff’s lawyer had bobbled his case, the ground of dismissal was the plaintiff’s bobble, which we thought, given his physical condition, was a weak ground for dismissal. We did not rule that his case should not have been dismissed, but we remanded for a fuller consideration of the unusual issue that it presented. There is nothing comparable in this case. As we said, the judge should not have told the plaintiff there would be no extensions of time, no matter what, for responding to the hospital’s motion for summary judgment. But because no excuse for missing the deadline was ever offered, the ‘no extensions no matter what’ threat was never carried out.”

Affirmed.

14-1449 Sheikh v. Grant Regional Health Center

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, Conley, J., Posner, J.

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