Two published decisions thus far in July. We'll take up the July 2 opinion first because there ain't much to the July 10 entry order.
Y'all remember that Gloria Gaynor song that Diana Ross covered in the '90s? At first I was afraid . . . of course you do.
"Not this time" says SCOV.
The Vermont Human Rights Commission (HRC) is a state agency that brings civil-rights enforcement actions—here, it went after a landlord for alleged housing discrimination.
HRC filed suit against landlord Homer Durkee based on a tenant's 2021 complaint that he discriminated against her while she rented one of his Enosburg Falls units. While the case was pending, Durkee died. According to his lawyer, he didn't own anything in his name alone when he died; the rental was jointly owned with his wife, and nobody ever opened an estate for him. After Homer’s death, his wife later set things up so that she kept a life estate in the property and their four kids would get full title when she died. She also died without ever being named as a defendant.
HRC, looking at a deceased landlord and no estate, asked the trial court to substitute the four adult kids and the wife's estate in place of Durkee so it could amend the complaint to hit them with their own liability for how the property got transferred. The trial court was, as the kids say, "not into that." I don't actually know if the kids say that. I'm getting old.
Anywho, the trial court treated HRC's idea as: "You're trying to turn a discrimination case against dad into a new case against the kids and mom's estate." The trial court said that, even assuming the claim survives dad's death, the correct stand‑in is his estate—essentially, whoever legally steps into his shoes—not a new group of people with new theories. Because HRC hadn't put a proper replacement defendant in front of the court, the trial court denied substitution and some other pending motions, gave HRC thirty days to sort things out, and when HRC didn't file anything, it dismissed the case without prejudice.
HRC appeals.
On appeal, HRC tells SCOV that the trial court misunderstood. In HRC's view, it was just trying to substitute the kids and the wife's estate for Homer and then later figure out personal liability, and Rule 25 let them do that because the kids are "distributees" of Homer's assets.
The majority ain't buying it. The SCOV majority is willing to assume the discrimination claim lives on after Homer's death, but says HRC never showed that the kids or the wife's estate were the right legal stand‑ins for Homer. The only asset anyone can point to is the rental, which passed automatically to the wife when Homer died because of how they owned it, and that's just not the same as the kids inheriting directly from Homer. There's no estate opened for Homer, no indication the kids or the wife's estate are legally acting in his place, and no evidence they hold what he held in the way the law requires for this kind of procedural substitution. So, the majority says the trial court was right to say "wrong people" and to leave the dismissal in place.
I realize that because I've been writing "majority" here, you might assume there's a dissent. That would be a reasonable but wrong assumption. All we have today is a concurrence penned by Justice Nolan and joined by Justice Eaton.
And the concurrence would go further. From the concurrence's position, when Homer died, the case simply stopped being a live case because not every kind of civil-rights or remedial claim keeps going after a defendant dies. Under that approach, SCOV never even gets to who the proper replacement defendant might be; the answer is that there isn't one, because the claim itself died with Homer. The concurrence also makes clear its discomfort with the idea that people who haven’t been accused of doing anything wrong can be dragged into years‑old litigation just because they later received something by inheritance. Human Rights Comm'n v. Durkee, 2026 VT 27.
On to the entry order. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that when lawyers get in trouble for something in a different state and they're licensed in Vermont, they also get the same kind of trouble here—unless there's some good reason to deviate. This is also known as reciprocal discipline.
Here, Attorney Girdwood is in trouble in New Hampshire for allegedly misappropriating trust account funds and lying to opposing counsel about a check being in the mail. He was placed on immediate interim suspension status by the New Hampshire Supreme Court in January 2026. The rules require SCOV to impose the same discipline unless SCOV finds "'upon the face of the record from which the discipline is predicated it clearly appears, or disciplinary counsel or the lawyer demonstrates,' that such discipline would be unwarranted." Neither disciplinary counsel nor respondent made any such claim and so respondent's license in Vermont is also placed on immediate interim suspension. In re Girdwood, 2026 VT 30 (mem.)
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