COLUMBIA, S.C. (Legal Newsline) - A teacher who claims school administrators engaged in a civil conspiracy to have her fired for reporting a student to the police will have another shot at proving her case after the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned its own precedent.
The decision drew criticism from one justice who said that by correcting one problem, the state’s high court may have created a larger one by leaving jurors free to impose liability on defendants based solely on their “own sense of fairness and right and wrong.”
Leisel Paradis sued the Charleston County School District, a high school and two administrators claiming she was given an unsatisfactory performance evaluation and ultimately fired for reporting a student’s classroom misconduct to police. She sued for defamation and civil conspiracy, but the district and appeals court dismissed her conspiracy claims because she failed to plead “special damages” arising specifically from the alleged conspiracy.
The South Carolina Supreme Court reversed, ruling in a May 19 decision that special damages aren’t required to prove civil conspiracy. To reach that conclusion, the court overturned its 1981 decision Todd v. S.C. Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance, which it said had been misinterpreted by other courts to mean plaintiffs must prove specific damages stemming from the conspiracy, as opposed to damages also attributed to other claims such as breach of contract or invasion of privacy.
“The essential principle Todd intended to address was the need to plead an overt act in furtherance of the agreement, not special damages,” the court said. To clarify, the court said plaintiffs in civil conspiracy cases must prove only that two or more people conspired to commit an unlawful act and that the act caused damages to the plaintiff.
In his decision, Chief Justice Donald Beatty traced the history of conspiracy law back to England, noting civil conspiracy in particular “has long given rise to uncertainty as to its elements and proper application.” In Todd, he said, the court addressed a situation where the plaintiff tacked a civil conspiracy claim onto a series of other claims without identifying how the conspiracy caused his damages.
Courts subsequently cited the “Todd rule” to throw out cases that didn’t plead special damages, but that was never the true holding of Todd, the justice wrote. The only requirement in a civil conspiracy claim is that the plaintiff prove “an overt act and resulting damages.”
Justice John Cannon Few, in a concurrence, said he agreed the misinterpreted Todd standard had to go but worried that plaintiffs now can sue over “lawful, non-tortious conduct” by claiming civil conspiracy.
He described a case he oversaw years earlier, in which a developer tried to buy out a condominium complex so he could renovate the units and sell them at a profit. After offering the owners $400,000 per unit the owners decided that was too low and sought competing offers. To thwart any competitors, the developer bought one unit for $600,000, making it impossible for anyone else to obtain the universal assent required under the complex’s bylaws.
Everybody sued the developer, the judge recalled, but none of the claims could stick except for a vague claim of civil conspiracy. The judge dismissed that too, because while the developer’s behavior was infuriating, it wasn’t illegal.
“I disagree with the majority that we should unleash this still-undefined and now-unrestrained menace on the public as an independent tort,” Few wrote in his concurrence.
“The law should never permit a court or a jury to impose civil liability for lawful, non-tortious conduct,” he concluded. “Without specific requirements, elements, or standards, the decision maker is left with nothing but its own sense of what is fair or responsible. That is neither fair nor responsible.”