John Woods v. City of Berwyn

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• affirming summary judgment where the plaintiff failed to propose the name of any employee who engaged in conduct comparable to the plaintiff, went before the board, and remained employed based on the evidence
• employer may not be subject to liability if ultimate decision-maker determines that adverse action is justified apart from biased subordinate’s influence
• “[T]he phrase comes from one of Aesop’s Fables in which a monkey induces a cat, by flattery, to extract roasting chestnuts from the fire.”
• “[T]he Board’s formal and adversarial procedures and the evidence that the Board relied on to support its decision to terminate [the plaintiff] broke the chain of causation.”
• when terminating employee, city board “did not rely” on the conclusions of an allegedly biased supervisor, in- stead deciding based on facts presented by an unbiased party, so cat’s paw theory of liability did not apply
• “[i]n this case, the hearing broke the chain of causation because the record shows that the Board did not rely on the facts presented by the presumably biased” employee

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).