Taryn Bell had just returned home from a mid-January Parent Teacher Association meeting when she got a text from a local television reporter with news that a federal judge had granted her request to dismiss her civil rights lawsuit against the Jefferson County Public Schools district.
“I was baffled,” Bell said.
Bell was confused because she never asked the judge to dismiss the lawsuit. Neither had her other co-plaintiffs.
Instead, their attorney, Teddy Gordon, asked the judge to dismiss the lawsuit, without ever getting their permission.
Bell and three other JCPS parents sued the district in 2024, alleging the school board’s decision to cut transportation to magnet schools was discriminatory against Black, Brown and low-income students. A June 2024 KyCIR investigation found magnet programs with high proportions of low-income students had the most families who planned to transfer schools after the transportation cuts were announced. The plaintiffs hoped the lawsuit would force the district to restore transportation to all magnet schools.
The Jefferson County Board of Education voted last week to bring back some magnet transportation starting in March.
Two weeks before the vote, Gordon filed a motion in federal court to dismiss the lawsuit on his clients’ behalf. The judge granted the request days later, effectively terminating a case that had implications for thousands of JCPS students.
According to legal experts, Gordon likely violated his ethical duty when he asked the judge to dismiss the case without his clients’ consent in January.
Attorneys need “express authority” from their clients before dismissing a case, University of Kentucky law professor Alan Kluegel told KyCIR. Doing so without that permission would likely violate the Kentucky Rules of Professional Conduct, Kluegel said, and open the attorney up to sanctions by the Kentucky Bar Association if the client files a complaint.
“You cannot unilaterally dismiss your client’s case,” Kluegel said.
Gordon is a longtime Louisville attorney, who has sued the district more than 50 times over the course of his career, according to the Courier Journal. He’s best known for winning two cases against JCPS over policies meant to promote racial integration, including one landmark case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006.
Gordon told KyCIR he asked the judge to dismiss Bell’s case because he had not heard back from his clients after he emailed them in November 2024 and presented them with several options including dismissal.
“It’s my belief that once no one responds, then it’s on my shores. Then I can decide what to do,” Gordon told KyCIR.
However, emails obtained by KyCIR show that while Bell did not respond to Gordon’s email, her co-plaintiffs Mary Bledsaw and Ashley Wright both wrote back, and neither chose to dismiss the case.
Wright asked Gordon to pursue finding an expert witness, which Gordon warned would add significant costs. Bledsaw wrote she wanted to hear more from the other plaintiffs before making a decision.
Bledsaw told KyCIR that while she had not given her explicit permission to drop the case, she was “not surprised” that Gordon filed to dismiss.
“I kind of figured that there was no way that Mr. Gordon felt that he could move forward without an expert witness,” Blesdaw said.
Wright did not respond to KyCIR’s request for comment.
Gordon said he reached out to an expert after that November email exchange, but “nothing happened.”
“I just let it go. I really wasn’t feeling that well either,” he said. “I’m an old man with a bad heart.”
Kluegel, the UK professor, said if an attorney is unable to work a case because of illness, that attorney should withdraw, which would allow the case to continue and the client to find new representation.
University of Louisville law professor Sam Marcosson told KyCIR that, generally, attorneys have an “ethical duty” to keep clients abreast of developments in their case and not act in ways adverse to the client’s interests.
Marcosson said he found it “extremely difficult” to imagine a situation in which an attorney could ethically dismiss a case without getting the client’s permission. But he was not speaking directly about Bell’s case.
Gordon admitted to KyCIR that he did “fail to notify all of the plaintiffs with a follow up that … the case would be officially dismissed.” He’s since apologized.
Bell said Gordon was litigating the case pro bono, and that plaintiffs had not lost any money as a result. But she doesn’t feel good about how the case ended.
“I honestly feel like I’ve been let down by not only the school system, but now the [legal] system itself,” Bell told KyCIR.
She also worries that with the case dismissed, JCPS is under less pressure to restore magnet transportation beyond what the board approved last week.
That decision came too late for her family. She already transferred her son from his magnet school, and the new routes do not restore service to the magnet middle school she would want her son to attend next year.
