# Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb

> Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit · March 7, 1986 · 785 F.2d 523

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9474603

## Case

- **Full name:** SHAARE TEFILA CONGREGATION, Individually, and on Behalf of Its Members; Rabbi Martin S. Halpern; Shirley Altman; William Harkaway; Marshall S. Levin; Maurice Potosky and Dr. Jacob Teller, Appellants, and Aetna Casualty & Surety Company, Plaintiff, v. John William COBB; William Randall Harris; Thomas Lloyd Heine; William Hess; Thomas Joseph Hunt, Jr.; Raymond Lee Jordan; Dominic Queen and Michael David Remer, Appellees
- **Court:** Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
- **Decided:** March 7, 1986
- **Citations:** 785 F.2d 523; 54 U.S.L.W. 2471; 1986 U.S. App. LEXIS 22800
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Concurrence by Murnaghan
- **Judges:** Hall, Murnaghan, Wilkinson
- **Cited by:** 22 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

## Citator (automated)

- **Red flag:** Reversed on other grounds by Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb, 481 U.S. 615 (1987).
- Negative treatments: 1
- Distinguished by: 0
- Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9474603

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- holding that it agreed "with the Third Circuit's interpretation of the `full and equal benefit' clause ... and conclude that state action is required in order to assert a claim under that statute"; citing Mahone

## Opinion text

MURNAGHAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Bearing in mind that hard cases pose the risk of making bad law the present controversy constitutes a hard case. The behavior of which the defendants stand accused was execrable. In also reaching the conclusion Judge Hall has expressed, I nevertheless steadfastly hope that, if the allegations are supported by proof, stern retribution under the laws of Maryland will be meted out to the defendants.
Yet the law is grounded on facts, not on misperceptions of fact. For persons of the ilk which the defendants, at the present posture of the case, are revealed to be to have the power to confer jurisdiction on the federal courts would, in all probability, lead to very regrettable consequences.
I think not only of Jews and the regrettable indignities they may well have suffered here at the hands of the defendants. I cannot say that my sympathies for the first time go out to them only because those sympathies have already gone out to the Jews long ago and on many occasions as bad as or far worse than the instant one.
My ethnic origins are principally Hibernian. On March 17, for one group of Irish hotheads and on July 12 for another (as well as other dates during the year), violence deriving from misperceptions, of Catholics on the one hand, or of Protestants on the other, as an inferior human sort or race has broken out, to my everlasting regret from time to time. Yet it will but contribute to disruption of our nation to accord such ill mannered and unreasoned fracases the dignity of status as civil rights controversies. They belong in the state courts, where justice, more immediate and more personalized, is likely to be at hand.
Accordingly, I concur in the conclusion that 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 , 1982 and 1985(3) do not afford a basis for bringing suit in the circumstances here involved.

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9474603. Public record. Not legal advice.