CURRY v. LOPEZ (2019)

ORDER

John Curry became involved in state-court litigation in 2005 when his wife filed for divorce. He brought this suit in federal court in 2017, essentially alleging a conspiracy among his (now) ex-wife, her attorney, and two state-court judges who decided that he must pay his ex-wife an amount of child support that Curry considers unlawful and wants invalidated. The district court granted the defendants’ motions to dismiss. It concluded that Curry’s claims against the judges were barred under the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, see D.C. Court of Appeals v. Feldman, 460 U.S. 462, 103 S.Ct. 1303, 75 L.Ed.2d 206 (1983); Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co., 263 U.S. 413, 44 S.Ct. 149, 68 L.Ed. 362 (1923), and by absolute judicial immunity, and his claims against the other defendants also lacked subject-matter jurisdiction. We affirm because the district court correctly ruled that it lacked jurisdiction.

Curry’s claims do not fall within federal subject-matter jurisdiction. To the extent that Curry’s claims seek to overturn a final judgment of the state court that he must pay child support, Rooker-Feldman blocks this suit. An attack “by state-court losers complaining of injuries caused by state-court judgments rendered before the district court proceedings commenced and inviting district court review and rejection of those judgments” is barred by Rooker-Feldman. Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Indus. Corp., 544 U.S. 280, 284, 125 S.Ct. 1517, 161 L.Ed.2d 454 (2005). Even if Curry seeks to overturn only interlocutory orders of the state court, he gets no further. We recently ruled in Kowalski v. Boliker, 893 F.3d 987, 995 (7th Cir. 2018), that the Rooker-Feldman doctrine does not itself block federal-court review of interlocutory orders. Nevertheless, quite apart from Rooker-Feldman, “[n]othing in the Supreme Court’s decisions suggests that state-court decisions too provisional to deserve review within the state’s own system can be reviewed by federal district and appellate courts.” Harold v. Steel, 773 F.3d 884, 886 (7th Cir. 2014).

AFFIRMED