Nosoud Alemarah v. General Motors, LLC

RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION
Pursuant to Sixth Circuit I.O.P. 32.1(b)
File Name: 20a0362p.06
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT
NOSOUD ALEMARAH,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
GENERAL MOTORS, LLC,
Defendant-Appellee.
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No. 20-1346
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Eastern District of Michigan at Detroit.
No. 2:19-cv-10556—Bernard A. Friedman, District Judge.
Decided and Filed: November 18, 2020
Before: NORRIS, SUTTON, and KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judges.
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COUNSEL
ON BRIEF: Raymond Guzall III, RAYMOND GUZALL III, P.C., Farmington Hills,
Michigan, for Appellant. Martin C. Brook, Mami Kato, OGLETREE, DEAKINS, NASH,
SMOAK & STEWART, PLLC, Birmingham, Michigan, for Appellee.
The court delivered a PER CURIAM opinion. KETHLEDGE, J. (pg. 7), delivered a
separate concurring opinion.
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OPINION
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PER CURIAM. Nosoud Alemarah sued her former employer, General Motors, in both
state and federal court, claiming employment discrimination based upon identical factual
allegations. The state suit asserted state claims, the federal suit, federal ones. The state court
dismissed that case after the parties settled those claims; the federal district court granted
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summary judgment in favor of GM. Alemarah now challenges the court’s grant of summary
judgment, its order denying her motion to recuse the district judge, and an order awarding costs
to GM. We affirm, albeit with some concerns as to the recusal motion.
I.
In 2018, Alemarah sued GM and her former supervisor in Michigan state court, asserting
claims under the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, MCL 37.2101 et seq. In February 2019,
Alemarah filed a nearly identical complaint in federal court, asserting claims under Title VII of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and naming only GM as a defendant.
In October 2019, the state court submitted Alemarah’s action to case evaluation (a form
of alternative dispute resolution) under MCR 2.403. GM and Alemarah each accepted the
mediation panel’s recommendation—a $400,000 case-evaluation award—and the state court
entered an order dismissing Alemarah’s claims with prejudice.
In early January 2020, GM moved for summary judgment on res-judicata grounds in the
federal case. Alemarah moved (frivolously) to strike GM’s motion and to sanction GM for filing
it. She also filed a motion to recuse the district judge, Bernard Friedman. The district court
denied Alemarah’s motions, granted summary judgment in favor of GM, and taxed $4,715 of
costs against Alemarah. This appeal followed.
II.
A.
We review de novo the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of GM. See
Smith v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 167 F.3d 286, 289 (6th Cir. 1999).
The court granted summary judgment to GM on the ground that the state court’s
dismissal of Alemarah’s state-law claims was res judicata as to her federal claims here.
A state-court judgment has the same preclusive effect in federal court as it does in the rendering
state. See 28 U.S.C. § 1738; Abbott v. Michigan, 474 F.3d 324, 330 (6th Cir. 2007). In
Michigan, res judicata “bars a second, subsequent action when (1) the prior action was decided
on the merits, (2) both actions involve the same parties or their privies, and (3) the matter in the

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No. 20-1346 Alemarah v. General Motors, LLC Page 3
second case was, or could have been, resolved in the first.” Adair v. State, 680 N.W.2d 386, 396
(Mich. 2004).
Alemarah challenges all three elements. As to the first, she says that the state court’s
order dismissing her claims after acceptance of the case evaluation was not a “judgment on the
merits.” But Michigan courts have said otherwise: “[A]cceptance of a case evaluation is
essentially a consent judgment, and [r]es judicata applies to consent judgments.” Garrett v.
Washington, 886 N.W.2d 762, 766 (Mich. Ct. App. 2016) (internal citations and quotation marks
omitted).
As to the second element, Alemarah argues that the parties in her federal and state cases
were different because the state case had an additional defendant—namely her supervisor. But
the relevant inquiry “is whether the plaintiff and defendant in the precluded action were opposing
parties in the first action; the presence of additional [parties] does not affect the analysis.” U.S.
ex rel. Sheldon v. Kettering Health Network, 816 F.3d 399, 416 (6th Cir. 2016) (applying
Michigan law). Here, Alemarah and General Motors were parties in both cases, so the second
element is met.
The same is true for the third element, i.e., that the matter in the second case could have
been resolved in the first. As applied in Michigan, res judicata “bars not only claims already
litigated, but also every claim arising from the same transaction that the parties, exercising
reasonable diligence, could have raised but did not.” Adair, 680 N.W.2d at 396. Here, nobody
disputes that Alemarah could have litigated her federal claims in her state-court action. Indeed
her two complaints are nearly identical. The district court therefore properly granted summary
judgment to GM.
B.
Alemarah argues that Judge Friedman should have recused himself from this case. We
review a district court’s denial of a recusal motion for an abuse of discretion. See United States
v. Howard, 218 F.3d 556, 566 (6th Cir. 2000).

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A federal judge “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality
might reasonably be questioned” or “[w]here he has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a
party[.]” 28 U.S.C. § 455(a), (b)(1). Here, Alemarah asserts that Judge Friedman demonstrated
hostility toward her counsel through a sequence of events that she regards as retaliatory. In
January 2020, the court scheduled a hearing for GM’s summary-judgment motion at Wayne
State University Law School. Three days later, Alemarah’s counsel sent the case manager an
email in which he asserted at some length that the law-school environment would be difficult for
his client emotionally. Counsel also asserted the following:
[N]either of the parties [sic] attorneys nor any judge would be able to completely
set aside the theater atmosphere of attempting to educate students and play to the
crowd which will detract from the job which needs to be performed by the
attorneys and the court. Arguments will be overly drawn out and skewed for the
purposes of educating and playing to the students, as will the commentaries of the
court.
Counsel therefore requested that, “if oral argument is needed by the court in this case that
oral argument be held in a court room.”
Three days later, Judge Friedman sent a letter to Alemarah’s counsel—by all appearances
ex parte—in which he first agreed to change the hearing venue and then asserted as follows:
Your additional comments I found to be highly offensive and entirely uncalled
for. They reveal your lack of understanding of the purpose of hearing motions at
a law school and your unfamiliarity with how the Court conducts these
proceedings. Contrary to your uninformed assumptions, there is no “theater
atmosphere,” no one “play[s] to the crowd,” the oral arguments are not “overly
drawn out and skewed for the purpose of educating and playing to the students,”
and the attorneys are not called upon to “perform.” Motion hearings held at a law
school are official court proceedings, and the same procedures and rules,
including those concerning decorum, apply there just as they do in the courtroom.
Judge Friedman closed the letter as follows:
Your objection to holding motion hearings at Wayne makes clear to me that you
do not appreciate your professional obligation to participate in activities that are
beneficial to the public. I therefore intend to ask Chief Judge Denise Page Hood,
who is also the chair of this Court’s pro bono program, to place your name on the
list of attorneys who are to be assigned cases through this program.

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Judge Friedman thereafter cancelled the motion hearing and ruled in GM’s favor on
every remaining motion. In the court’s order denying reconsideration of its grant of summary
judgment, the court described Alemarah as “apparently having been shocked awake” by that
grant. In its order denying the motion to recuse, the court asserted that “plaintiff’s imagination
has gotten the better of her” as to whether the court’s letter had been “angry”; and that, “[a]gain,
plaintiff is hallucinating” as to her argument that the district court had retaliated against her and
her counsel.
We disagree with the court’s assertion that its comments as described above—
particularly the “hallucination” one—were merely “ordinary admonishments[.]” Liteky v. United
States, 510 U.S. 540, 556 (1994). And a reasonable observer could conclude that the court’s
statement in its letter to Alemarah’s counsel (which was itself out of the ordinary)—that “[y]our
additional comments I found to be highly offensive and entirely uncalled for”—was an
expression of anger on the court’s part. Yet those comments were not “so extreme as to display
clear inability to render fair judgment.” Id. at 551.
Closer to the line was Judge Friedman’s statement, in the same letter, that he intended to
ask the court’s chief judge “to place your name on the list of attorneys who are to be assigned
cases through” the court’s pro bono program. That action could easily be seen as punitive,
notwithstanding Judge Friedman’s assertion that its purpose was to educate counsel about his
“professional obligation[s].” Viewed in the context of the frivolousness of several of Alemarah’s
motions, however, we conclude that the cited comments were the sort of “expressions of
impatience, dissatisfaction, annoyance, and even anger, that are within the bounds of what
imperfect men and women, even after having been confirmed as federal judges, sometimes
display.” Id. at 555–56. Thus, though we by no means condone the court’s actions, we hold that
the court did not abuse its discretion in denying the motion to recuse.
C.
Finally, Alemarah challenges the court’s order denying her motion to “overturn” the
$4,715 of costs taxed in GM’s favor. As an initial matter, we do have jurisdiction to review this
issue, even though (as GM points out) Alemarah’s notice of appeal did not designate this order

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as part of the appeal. The order was filed on April 6, 2020, which gave Alemarah until May 6 to
file a notice of appeal as to it. See Fed. R. App. P. 4(a)(1)(A). Alemarah did not file another
document styled as a notice of appeal, but on May 1 she did file with our court a “Civil Appeal
Statement” that said this order was part of her appeal. That document provided “the notice
required by” Appellate Rule 3 and thus was “the functional equivalent of what the rule requires.”
Smith v. Barry, 502 U.S. 244, 248 (1992) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Fed. R.
App. P. 3(c)(4) (“An appeal must not be dismissed for informality of form or title of the notice of
appeal[.]”); Fed. R. App. P. 4(d).
As for the merits, we review de novo whether taxed expenses are allowable under 28
U.S.C. § 1920. See Colosi v. Jones Lang LaSalle Americas, Inc., 781 F.3d 293, 295 (6th Cir.
2015). We review a court’s determination that costs are reasonable and necessary for an abuse
of discretion. See id.
Here, GM submitted as costs the amount it paid for deposition transcripts that it attached
to its motion for summary judgment. Suffice it to say that the costs were allowable and that the
district court did not abuse its discretion in taxing them.
* * *
The district court’s judgment is affirmed.

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CONCURRENCE
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KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judge, concurring. I join the court’s opinion in full, and write
further with regard to the district court’s reaction to the reservations of Alemarah’s counsel as to
holding oral argument at a law school rather than in a courtroom. The district court’s desire to
provide law students with an opportunity to observe oral arguments is itself commendable, and,
properly conducted, oral arguments at a law school can benefit everyone concerned.
Respectfully, however, the court’s letter to counsel—in which the court said that it personally
found counsel’s reservations “to be highly offensive and entirely uncalled for,” and in which the
court stated its intention “to place your name on the list of attorneys who are to be assigned
cases” to litigate pro bono—was at best an overreaction.
Indeed I have some sympathy with counsel’s reservations. As a practitioner,
I participated in oral arguments held at law schools; and in one of them, I distinctly recall, the
proceedings indeed focused more on playing to the gallery than they did on finding the right
answer to the question at hand. (Of course no one complained to the court afterward.) That does
not mean courts should never hold arguments outside a courtroom. But a court must remember
that our cases are vastly more important to the parties than they are to any observer.

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