In this episode, Mark and Kian chat about two opinions the Seventh Circuit issued in February 2024.

The first case, Chicago Joe’s Team Room v. Village of Broadview, is a long-running Section 1983 case brought by a would-be adult-entertainment venue against the Chicago suburb that prevented it from opening. In 2008, the district court found the suburb violated the First Amendment, and the parties then spent more than a decade litigating damages, which were based on a lost-profits theory. The venue eventually failed to prove lost-profits damages because the district court excluded all of its evidence, which mostly consisted of lay opinion testimony from the owner of the plaintiff business. The Seventh Circuit affirmed, explaining that the owner’s lay opinion testimony was correctly excluded under Rule of Evidence 701 because he could not “properly base his lost-profits opinions on his knowledge obtained in day-to-day management of the company” (since the company never opened).

In the second, Bryant v. Chupack, Judge Easterbrook takes readers on a brief but informative tour through the Rooker-Feldman doctrine and claim preclusion. The Rooker-Feldman doctrine holds that because only the Supreme Court can review the judgments of state courts, district courts lack jurisdiction to hear challenges to state-court decisions. The district court dismissed Bryant on those grounds, but the Seventh Circuit reversed: Rooker-Feldman did not apply because the “plaintiffs had lost a battle in state court but had not yet lost the war.” Claim preclusion, however, barred the plaintiffs’ claims on the merits: Because the plaintiffs could have presented their federal constitutional claims in the state-court case, claim-preclusion principles mean they were “not free to move what amounts to an appellate argument to a different judicial system.”

The two cases Mark and Kian discuss in this episode each raise a tricky but important question.

The first, Green Plains Trade Group, LLC v. Archer Daniels Midland Co., addresses how federal courts should discern the content of state law. The landmark Supreme Court case Erie Railroad v. Tompkins says federal courts should try to predict what the state supreme court would do. And in implementing this rule, the Seventh Circuit (like other federal appellate courts) has cautioned district courts from accepting novel state-law theories. In Green Plains, the Seventh Circuit clarified when this “maxim” against novel theories applies—only where “the evidence concerning the content of state law is in equipoise.”

The second case, U.S. ex rel Health v. Wisconsin Bell, concerns what counts as a “claim” under the False Claims Act. And the Seventh Circuit held—in an acknowledged split from the Fifth Circuit—that an application for funds can be a “claim” even if the funds at issue do not come from the U.S. Treasury. Instead, the Seventh Circuit concluded that “the federal government can be deemed to ‘provide’ money for purposes of the False Claims Act by maintaining an active role in its collection and distribution.”

In this month’s very special episode of Seventh Circuit Roundup, hosts Kian Hudson and Mark Crandley interview legendary Seventh Circuit litigator Tom Fisher. Tom recently concluded nearly two decades of service as Indiana’s solicitor general, a role that frequently led Tom to the Seventh Circuit courthouse. Indeed, few if any lawyers have argued more high-profile cases before the Seventh Circuit. In this interview, Tom shares his thoughts on how to find one’s way into appellate advocacy, tips for appellate litigators, Seventh Circuit-specific wrinkles, and more.