Constitutional Law; Due process; debarment

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Constitutional Law; Due process; debarment

A contractor’s disbarment is not a basis for a claim of deprivation of a property interest.

“[M[any a person fired by one employer can find a job at another. Debarment is either like firing or is equivalent to an employee’s suspension for misconduct; neither necessarily means unemployment for life or even a need to change occupations. Plaintiffs’ difficulty is not simply that Blackout failed to allege that it submitted bids to other public agencies (and for that matter failed to allege the effect of the CTA’s decision on its portfolio of private contracts) but that Blackout concedes that it stopped bidding for public contracts. That would produce a failure of proof at trial as surely as it produced a speculative complaint. Plaintiffs might have made up for the lack of personal experience by showing what happened to other contractors that the CTA has debarred, but the complaint does not contain any allegations along those lines. The district judge thus acted within the scope of her authority under Iqbal and Twombly to distinguish plausible from speculative claims.”

Affirmed.

12-3352 Blackout Sealcoating, Inc., v. Peterson

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Bucklo, J., Easterbrook, J.

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