NYCLU files brief on LPS legal-fees issue

The New York Civil Liberties Union recently filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of five District 15 parents from whom the district is seeking reimbursement of the cost of legal services the district incurred in fighting the parents' unsuccessful civil-rights lawsuit to prevent the closing of the Number Six School in Woodmere.

Soon after U.S. District Court Judge Joanna Seybert dismissed the parents' lawsuit on Aug. 24, the Lawrence school board asked the court to assess attorney fees totaling more than $150,000 against the plaintiffs. The NYCLU’s brief argues that assessing attorneys’ fees to the plaintiffs in this case would violate state civil rights laws and unnecessarily discourage people from challenging civil rights violations in court.

Samantha Fredrickson, director of the NYCLU’s Nassau County Chapter, emphasized that the brief was based soley on the issue of attorney fees and not the merits of the lawsuit. “If losing a civil rights lawsuit could ruin your finances, then people wouldn’t file them and countless civil rights violations would go unchallenged,” she said.

The parents who brought the case, Tara Incantalupo, Andrew Levey, Stacey Sullivan, Flora Chen and Steve Jackson, claimed that the decision to close the Number Six School violated their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, and that the school board was pushing an Orthodox agenda over public-school concerns. In her decision dismissing the lawsuit Judge Seybert stated “Nothing the plaintiffs have pled remotely resembles any violations of the First or Fourteenth Amendments, except, ironically, for plaintiffs’ requested relief, which itself violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”

The plaintiffs used attorney Robert Agostisi on a pro bono basis in that case, but have since hired the New York City law firm Leeds, Morelli & Brown to try to have Seybert’s decision reversed and avoid having to reimburse the school board for the district's legal expenses.

Lawrence school board member Dr. Asher Mansdorf said that when the NYCLU made the decision to file its brief in support of the parents they should have studied more closely how frivolous the lawsuit was.

"The NYCLU did not look at the frivolous aspects of this lawsuit," said Mansdorf.

The attorney hired by the Lawrence school board to fight the civil rights lawsuit is David Butler of the Washington D.C. law firm Bingham McCulchen LLP. Al D'Agostino, an attorney for the school board, describes Butler as a “national expert in constitutional law," yet a bio on Bingham McCulchen's Web site describes his areas of expertise as being "nearly every commercial litigation practice area."