Terminated Professor Denied Injunction by Virginia Federal Court

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Angela France

The Virginia Federal Court sitting in Big Stone Gap recently applied the tougher preliminary injunction standard set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. In doing so, it denied a professor’s request for an injunction against his employment termination in Holbrook v. The University of Virginia’s College at Wise. The Court recognized that the repudiation of the traditional “balance of the hardships” test formulated in Blackwelder Furniture Co. of Statesville, which had been relied upon for 30 years, places a difficult burden on the party seeking the injunction as it requires a party to meet all four prongs of the injunction test.

In this case, the professor was unable to meet the prong – likelihood of irreparable harm. The professor claimed that the Faculty Handbook required that he be allowed to work at the College for another year after being denied tenure.  Therefore, he sought an injunction against his termination pending the outcome of his claims for violations of his federal and constitutional rights. He argued that obtaining future employment while without a job was difficult at best, and therefore an injunction was needed to prevent further harm.  Although sympathetic to his situation, the Court reasoned that there was the possibility of adequate compensation for the year of employment at a later date in the case, which weighed heavily against a claim of irreparable harm.

Although in this case the Virginia Federal Court focused on the irreparable harm prong, litigants seeking injunctions will most likely find the requirement in the Winter test that a party demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits the most problematic. The Blackwelder standard required only that a party demonstrate a grave or serious question for litigation and it allowed more interplay between the standard’s prongs.  The Winter test is not as flexible.

We’ve also discussed the new, tougher standard in relation to non-competes and as it related to a Virginia state court case in previous posts on Virginia Business Law Update.
 

 

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