Today, CCL filed a petition for certiorari in the Supreme Court in City of Miami Gardens v. Wells Fargo & Co., a Fair Housing Act case brought by CCL's client, Miami Gardens, over discriminatory mortgage lending by the bank.

      The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit threw out Miami Garden's case on its own motion, raising issues about the city's standing to pursue the action. CCL argues that the Court of Appeals wrongly raised that question in the course of an appeal on whether the city met the statute of limitations, a narrow question on which discovery had been limited. To answer the question that was not raised by the trial court, the defendant, or any of the briefing, CCL's Robert Peck had argued would have required the trial court to permit discovery over loans originated before the limitations period. as both U.S. Supreme Court and Eleventh Circuit precedent holds. 

     After the ruling, CCL petitioned for rehearing en banc, which was denied. Still, a dissent from that denial written by Acting Chief Judge Wilson and joined by another judge, charged that the Eleventh Circuit panel's action was the equivalent of a teacher taking away a student's pencil, giving an exam, and then failing the student for turning in a blank paper.

     The Supreme Court petition asserts that the Eleventh Circuit's decision conflicts with a 2015 U.S. Supreme Court's decision that found the same tactic by the same judge violated elementary notions of fundamental fairness and asks that it be reversed.

     Wells Fargo is expected to file a brief in opposition to the petition, to which CCL will write a reply.