The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Monday asked New York's highest court to decide whether a previous ruling from a state small claims court barred a woman from suing her former employer for unpaid wages.

The certified question, crafted by a three-judge panel of the Manhattan-based federal appeals court, invited the New York Court of Appeals to rule, for the first time, on whether a provision of the New York City Civil Court Act bars subsequent federal lawsuits under the principle of claim preclusion.

The issue, while novel to the Court of Appeals, has divided New York's intermediate appeals courts, which have split over the effect of res judicata, the legal doctrine that prevents courts from deciding the same issue twice.

The question, the Second Circuit said, had significant public-policy implications, but disagreement in the lower courts made it impossible to predict how the high court might rule.

"Because this issue turns on a question of state law for which no controlling decisions of the New York Court of Appeals exist, and about which New York's Appellate Division is divided, we certify the proper interpretation of Section 1808 [of the Civil Court Act] to the Court of Appeals," U.S. Circuit Judge Richard J. Sullivan wrote on behalf of the panel.

The lawsuit involved claims for unpaid overtime wages, liquidated damages and attorney fees by Charlene Simmons, a former employee of Brooklyn-based transportation service company Trans Express Inc., who won a $1,000 judgment in Queens Small Claims Court in August 2018.

A Brooklyn federal judge dismissed Simmons suit last year, finding that her claims mirrored the ones that had already been decided in state small claims court. On appeal, however, Simmons argued that the New York Civil Court Act's language scaled back the scope of res judicata for small claims court judgments, and allowed her to later litigate similar claims that stemmed from the same action.

On Monday, Sullivan acknowledged that Simmons' "textual contentions have persuasive force," but added that the "conflicting decisions of the Appellate Division leave us unable to predict how the high court would rule."

New York's courts, Sullivan said, have all agreed that the statute has "some preclusive effect," though he noted they have struggled to find consensus on exactly how far it extended.

The Second Department, far example, has found that a plaintiff is not precluded from asserting claims in the state Supreme Court arising out of the same facts as those previously asserted in small claims court. The First and Third departments, on the other hand, have reached the opposite conclusion, holding that Section 1808 bars such claims, he said.

"Given these divergent understandings of Section 1808, we are unable to predict based on the current state of New York case law how the Court of Appeals would interpret Section 1808," Sullivan said, joined in the opinion by U.S. Circuit Judges Peter Hall and Joseph Bianco.

According to the ruling, the Court of Appeals could reformulate the question as it sees fit or expand it to "address any other issues of New York law that would assist this court in determining whether Simmons' federal suit is barred by Section 1808."

Simmons is represented by Abdul Hassan of Abdul Hassan Law Group in Queens Village. Trans Express is represented in the case by Emory D. Moore Jr. and P. Kevin Connelly of McDermott Will & Emery in Chicago.

The case is captioned Simmons v. Trans Express.

Read More: