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868 F.2d 1017

Docket Nos. 88-5018 thru 88-5025.

Myers v. Scott County

Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals

Submitted Oct. 20, 1988.

Decided March 3, 1989.

Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals · decided 1989-03-03

2 counsel of record

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“[T]he theory of substantive due process is properly reserved for truly egregious and extraordinary cases,”

quoted by 3 later decisions, including Chesterfield Development Corporation v. City of Chesterfield M R, Rozman v. City of Columbia Heights

Applies 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))

Relies on Brame v. United States · Myers v. Morris · 672 F. Supp. 1152 - In Re Scott County Master Docket

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1989-03-03

How this case has been cited

Cited by 41 later decisions — most recently April 2015 · most notably Chesterfield Development Corporation v. City of Chesterfield M R (1992), Spielman v. Hildebrand (1989)

10 federal appellate · 7 district · 8 state decisions

1501989199020002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

¶1Thomas Hunziker, Minneapolis, Minn., David Albright, Bloomington, Minn., Marc Kurzman, Minneapolis, Minn., for appellants.

¶2David Sturges, New Prague, Minn. & Jon Iverson, Minneapolis, Minn., for appel-lees.

¶3Before ARNOLD and MAGILL, Circuit Judges, and ROSS, Senior Circuit Judge.

¶4ARNOLD, Circuit Judge.

¶5These appeals arise out of an investigation into alleged sexual abuse of children in Scott County, Minnesota. Most of the facts and legal issues have already been thoroughly set forth and resolved in a previous appeal, Myers v. Morris, 810 F.2d 1437 (8th Cir.), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 108 S.Ct. 97, 98 L.Ed.2d 58 (1987). As a result of our decision in that appeal, summary judgment was entered in favor of the following groups of defendants: Guardians ad litem, therapists, police officers of the City of Jordan, Minnesota, the Scott County Board of Commissioners, the County Attorney, the County Sheriff, and deputy sheriffs.

¶6In the present appeal, we are asked to review the order of the District Court1 granting motions for summary judgment by Scott County, the Scott County Department of Human Services, and a group of *1019social workers. In re Scott County Master Docket, 672 F.Supp. 1152 (D.Minn.1987).

¶7We affirm. The opinion of the District Court exhaustively states the facts and discusses the applicable law. We see no point in embellishing at length on Judge Mac-Laughlin’s able opinion. As the District Court carefully explained, the theory of substantive due process is properly reserved for truly egregious and extraordinary cases, and violations of state law, in and of themselves, are not actionable under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. We have carefully considered the arguments of appellants, and we are well aware that they have suffered much. Their allegations, however, do not rise to a constitutional level. There may well have been deviations from proper investigative procedure in the delicate area of child sexual abuse. These matters, however, are best left to the common law of torts. We note that plaintiffs’ pendent state-law claims were dismissed without prejudice by the District Court, and we approve this action.

¶8Accordingly, the judgments are affirmed on the basis of the opinion of the District Court.2

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