Wash. Court of Appeals published opinion — 318583.pub.pdf

Citation: Wash. Court of Appeals published opinion — 318583.pub.pdf
Jurisdiction: Washington (state)
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Original Source: https://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/318583.pub.pdf ↗

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Kadlec's argument that Dr. Sambasivan still enjoyed general cardiology privileges

is nonresponsive to Dr. Sambasivan's contention that his ability to serve patients who

would have come to him at Kadlec for interventional cardiology consultations and

procedures was impaired. The doctor does not argue that he is entitled to recover for

impairment of contracts to provide general cardiology services.

Finally, the argument that Dr. Sambasivan could have traveled 150 miles from his

Tri-Cities-based practice to provide interventional cardiology services to patients in

Spokane, or could have traveled elsewhere, ignores the plain language of § 1981 that

"[a]ll persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right . .. to

make and enforce contracts ... as is enjoyed by white citizens." 42 U.S.C. § 1981(a)

(emphasis added). Arguing that a physician may practice his medical specialty at the

hospitals that do not discriminate against him is not a defense to a § 1981 claim, for

reasons that were explained by the United States Supreme Court in Jones. There, the

Court pointed out that racially-based restrictive covenants at issue in its 1948 decision in

Hurdv. Hodge, 334 U.S. 24,68 S. Ct. 847,92 L. Ed. 1187 (1948) had covered only two-

thirds of the lots of a single city block, and that preventing Blacks from buying or renting

homes in that specific area would not have rendered them ineligible to do so elsewhere in

the city. "Thus," Jones explained,

if § 1982 had been thought to do no more than grant Negro citizens the
legal capacity to buy and rent property free of prohibitions that wholly
disabled them because of the race,judicial enforcement of the restrictive