Harris v. City Cycle Sales, Inc.
No. 23-3116. 8/20/2024. D.Kan. Judge Hartz. Kansas Consumer Protection Act Claims—Law-of-the-Case Doctrine—Abandonment of Claim—Negligence—Sufficiency of Evidence on Causation.
August 20, 2024
Harris was seriously injured after the anti-lock brake system (ABS) on his motorcycle malfunctioned. He sued City Cycle Sales, Inc. (CCS) in Kansas state court, alleging negligence and violation of the Kansas Consumer Protection Act (KCPA). Harris abandoned the KCPA claims before the case was submitted to the jury but did not request that the dismissal be without prejudice. The jury returned a verdict for CCS, and the trial court entered judgment against Harris on all claims, disposing of the KCPA claim with prejudice. Harris appealed the adverse judgment on his negligence claim but not the KCPA claim, so the KCPA portion of the trial court’s judgment was preserved. On remand to the state court after appeal, Harris and CCS stipulated to dismissal of the case without prejudice. Harris then sued CCS in federal district court for negligence and violation of the KCPA. CCS moved to dismiss Harris’s KCPA claims for failure to state a claim under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6), arguing, among other things, that Harris had abandoned and waived his KCPA claims. As relevant here, the district court found that Harris’s abandonment of his KCPA claims could not become the law of the case so as to preclude his action, and it denied the motion. Harris was awarded judgment on both causes of action.
On appeal, CCS contended that the district court erred by not dismissing Harris’s KCPA claims under the law-of-the-case doctrine. Under this doctrine, once an issue has been resolved in a judicial proceeding, it ordinarily should not be reexamined by the court, whether a later panel of the same court or a lower court after an appellate court’s decision. It also applies when the reviewing court does not consider an issue because it has been waived—including by inaction—either on appeal or in the lower court. Here, Harris’s abandonment of the KCPA claims in the trial court resulted in that court’s final decision against him on those claims, and his failure to challenge that decision on appeal barred him, under the Kansas law-of-the-case doctrine, from trying to renew the claim after remand by the state appellate court. Accordingly, the district court erred by not dismissing the KCPA claims.
CCS also argued that there was insufficient evidence to support the negligence judgment because Harris failed to prove the causation element of the cause of action. However, the evidence regarding the ABS malfunction was sufficient for a nonexpert to reasonably infer that Harris established causation.
The denial of judgment as a matter of law on the causation issue was affirmed. The denial of judgment as a matter of law on the KCPA issue was reversed.