The state Supreme Court on Thursday said a potential class-action lawsuit can move forward about whether the University of Florida should be required to refund money to students for services that were not provided during a COVID-19 campus shutdown in 2020.
Justices, in a 5-2 decision, overturned a decision by the 1st District Court of Appeal that rejected the lawsuit, which involves fees that students paid for services such as transportation, health care and athletics.
A panel of the appeals court in 2022 said an Alachua County circuit judge should have dismissed the lawsuit because of sovereign immunity, which generally protects government agencies from liability.
But sovereign immunity does not apply in breach-of-contract lawsuits, and the Supreme Court on Thursday said the appeals court did not properly consider “permissible implied covenants” in agreements between the university and students. It also said the appeals-court ruling would have imposed a requirement for “extraordinary specificity in government contracts.”
“Indeed, (the appeals court ruling’s) reasoning suggests that government contracts are held to a standard that does not apply to any other contracts — not only because all implied covenants are negated, but also because a requirement is imposed for extraordinary specificity in contract terms,” the opinion shared by Chief Justice Carlos Muniz and Justices Charles Canady, Jorge Labarga, John Couriel and Renatha Francis said. “According to the First District, without a heightened level of specificity in its terms, a written contract is not ‘sufficient to overcome sovereign immunity.’ Nothing in our case law supports this view.”
The opinion did not determine whether the named plaintiff in the case, Anthony Rojas, and other people who were students at the time of the UF campus shutdown should receive refunds. It also didn’t foreclose the possibility that sovereign immunity could apply in the case but said that issue is “subject to further litigation.”
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The UF case was one of numerous similar lawsuits filed in Florida and across the country after campuses shut down and students were forced to take classes remotely in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Florida appellate courts have issued a series of rulings rejecting lawsuits filed against schools including the University of Central Florida, Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida A&M University, Miami Dade College and the private University of Miami.
At least some of those cases have been appealed to the Supreme Court, where they were put on hold pending the outcome of the UF case.
A Hillsborough County circuit judge last month ruled in favor of the University of South Florida in a similar lawsuit. Attorneys for the plaintiff in that case have appealed to the 2nd District Court of Appeal.
The cases involve fees, not tuition. A common issue has been whether fee-related agreements constituted binding contracts for the schools to provide services.
In the 1st District Court of Appeal’s ruling in the UF case, Judge Rachel Nordby wrote that “assorted documents attached to the complaint do not constitute an express written contract.”
“We are sympathetic to Rojas and all other students whose on-campus experiences were clipped short and rendered non-existent by the university’s response to COVID-19,” Nordby wrote. “And if there were a sufficient contract attached to his complaint, we would affirm the trial court (decision not to dismiss the case) without hesitation. But without such an express, written agreement … sovereign immunity bars the action.”
In a dissenting opinion Thursday, Justice Meredith Sasso wrote that she disagreed with the Supreme Court majority “when it comes to assessing how specific a plaintiff seeking to overcome a sovereign immunity defense must be.”
“In sum, none of the documents Rojas identified evince a written contract containing the terms he alleges the university breached,” Sasso, who was joined in the dissent by Justice Jamie Grosshans, wrote. “And while the alleged ‘implied covenants’ Rojas falls back on do not supplant or override express contractual provisions, they fail to relate to performance of an express term of the contract, adding obligations to the contract for which the parties did not negotiate.”
