Justia U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

After multiple appeals to the court and extensive trial and other proceedings, plaintiffs' Title VII class action for employment discrimination against Lufkin Industries, Inc. (Lufkin) culminated in a favorable multimillion dollar judgment and injunctive relief. Both parties subsequently challenged the district court's attorneys' fee award and Lufkin's complaint that back pay damages were erroneously authorized in an earlier appeal. The court affirmed as to the back pay damages but vacated and remanded as to the attorneys' fees. In particular, given the unrebutted evidence in the record that it was necessary for plaintiffs to retain counsel from outside the Eastern District of Texas, the district court abused its discretion in failing to use the rate counsel charged in their home district as the starting point in the lodestar calculation.

Plaintiffs in this putative class action were buyers and processors of farm-raised crawfish who sought to recover their economic loss from a pesticide manufacturer under the Louisiana Products Liability Act, (LPLA), La. Rev. State. Ann. 9:2800.54. At issue was whether the district court properly granted summary judgment to the manufacturer because plaintiffs' economic loss was unaccompanied by damage to their own person or property. The court held that, although plaintiffs have submitted evidence suggesting that they worked closely with crawfish farmers, plaintiffs have not submitted any evidence suggesting that the pesticide actually harmed their crawfish. The court also held that there was no evidence that plaintiffs were deprived of an actual, legal right to buy crawfish from the crawfish farmers. The court further denied plaintiffs' request to certify their proposed question to the Louisiana Supreme Court. Accordingly, the court affirmed the district court's order of summary judgment.

This appeal concerned the disposition of unclaimed funds from a class action settlement where plaintiffs and defendants settled the underlying antitrust claims and where funds from the settlement were allocated to various identified members of the plaintiff class. At issue was whether the district court was permitted to dispose of the unclaimed funds via cy pres, regardless of the terms of the State's unclaimed property statutes. The court held that the unclaimed funds allocated to Texas plaintiffs were subject to the Unclaimed Property Act (Act), Tex. Prop. Code Ann. 72.001-74.710, that Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(e) was not so broad as to preclude application of the Act, that the question of who had a right to the unclaimed funds was substantive in nature, and that the Act controlled. Accordingly, the judgment of the district court was reversed and vacated, and the case remanded for further proceedings.

Appellees filed suit asserting that their due process rights were violated when the Department of Homeland Security ("DHS") failed to make additional attempts at service after it had knowledge that the initial attempt at notice failed where the notice informed an obligor that an alien had been detained by DHS and that the obligor could post a cash bond to secure the alien's release. At issue was whether, in order to satisfy due process, the government must take additional reasonable steps to notify a bond obligor that the bond had been breached when the government had knowledge that the initial attempt at notice failed. The court affirmed summary judgment in favor of appellees and held that DHS violated the bond obligor's due process rights when it failed to take additional reasonable steps to notify the obligors of the bond demand after the initial notice was returned as undeliverable before it collected the bond.