District court mistakenly treated summary judgment motion as a Rule 12 motion to dismiss

The district court threw out this case under an unusual procedural twist. The plaintiffs alleged that the City of Troy was not maintaining its sidewalks in a manner that allowed disabled residents to maneuver the City in their wheelchairs. The parties litigated the case for several years and each side moved for summary judgment. The district court said plaintiffs could not proceed with the case because they lacked standing to sue. But the court did so under Rule 12, which guides motions to dismiss the complaint, not Rule 56, the summary judgment provision. 

The case is Lugo v. City of Troy, issued on August 27. No court has yet to determine if the City of Troy in fact violated federal disability law in failing to maintain the sidewalks for disabled residents. Instead, the parties got tangled in a standing argument: the City said plaintiffs were not in a position to bring this lawsuit their allegations were too conclusory to litigate the case. The district court agreed, and dismissed the case.

What makes the case unusual is that the district court rejected the case under Rule 12. As noted above, Rule 12 guides motions to dismiss, and Rule 12 motions are usually filed right after the plaintiff files the complaint, requiring the trial court to review the allegations to determine if the plaintiff has a case. Rule 56 motions are filed after the parties complete discovery and they have a full record, and the trial court has to decide if the plaintiff has enough evidence to win at trial. Sometimes, a trial court will convert a Rule 12 motion into a summary judgment if it looks like the court is able to consider materials outside the complaint in determining if the plaintiff has a case. But what happened here was the opposite: the trial court, despite having a summary judgment motion on the table, determined if the complaint stated a cause of action. That was wrong, the Court of Appeals says.

As two of our sister circuits have observed, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure “offer no support” for the sort of reverse Rule 12(d) conversion that the district court undertook here. There are good reasons for this. When a district court resolves a summary-judgment motion as a pleadings motion, it “disregard[s] the more robust procedural device the parties have invoked to frame the issue” and thus “unjustifiably ignores the fuller evidentiary record assembled by the parties.” Id. And in practice, a reverse Rule 12(d) conversion “will rarely (if ever) help to ‘secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination’ of the action.”

The case returns to the district court to resolve the summary judgment motion and to forget about the motion to dismiss under Rule 12.