The D.C. Circuit releases opinions on Tuesdays and Fridays. We read them all so you don’t have to. On Tuesday (Sept. 4), the court issued two opinions:
Ford v. Massarone. After committing three murders in 1980, Edward Ford, Jr. was convicted and sentenced under both federal and D.C. law. He is serving those sentences in federal prison. Ford sued the U.S. Parole Commission, arguing that under the parole rules in effect at the time of his convictions, he was entitled to an initial parole hearing on his D.C. sentence in 2000 but was not given that initial hearing until 2005. The commission scheduled the D.C. parole hearing for 2005 by applying a complex federal regulation that affects inmates serving sentences under both federal and D.C. law (which had dramatically different parole schemes). The district judge ruled in favor of the commission, but the D.C. Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Srinivasan (joined by Chief Judge Garland and Judge Griffith) found that the federal regulation unlawfully conflicted with a D.C. law that gave Ford the right to have a parole hearing on his D.C. sentence in 2000. As a remedy, the court ordered the commission to reconsider its decisions in Ford’s subsequent parole hearings based on the assumption that Ford had received the initial hearing to which he was entitled in 2000.
Teachers College v. National Labor Relations Board. Teachers College, the graduate school of education at Columbia University, has a collective bargaining agreement with a union representing clerical workers. In 2012, the union began to suspect the college of violating the agreement by transferring work that was supposed to be reserved for the bargaining unit to non-unit workers. The union repeatedly requested that the college provide the union with information about work performed by employees outside the bargaining unit, and the college repeatedly refused to provide the information. Eventually, the NLRB held that the college had violated federal labor law by not providing the information, and in an opinion by Chief Judge Garland (joined by Judges Edwards and Silberman), the court agreed. The union adequately showed that the requested information was relevant to a formal grievance the union had filed, Garland wrote. Silberman wrote a short concurrence to take issue with one prior decision of the NLRB that is cited once in a footnote in Garland’s opinion but is not essential to the result of the case.
