Milton Thomas v.

── Milton Thomas v. ── Court: Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit Date: June 09, 2026 Category: General U.S. COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT No. 24-1861 IN RE: MILTON THOMAS _____________________________ MILTON THOMAS, Appellant v. CITY OF PHILADELPHIA and THE SCHOOL DISTRICT OF PHILADELPHIA _____________________________ Appeal from the U.S. District Court, E.D. Pa. Judge Joel H. Slomsky, No. 2:21-cv-01725 Before: BIBAS, PORTER, and BOVE, Circuit Judges Argued Jan. 28, 2026; Decided Jun. 9, 2026 _____________________________ OPINION OF THE COURT BOVE, Circuit Judge. Milton Thomas has capably represented himself since 2004 in this roller coaster of a bankruptcy. In the third appeal to this Court arising out of those proceedings, Thomas argues that the Bankruptcy Court erred by denying his motion for civil contempt against the City of Philadelphia and a related party. He is correct. 1  After Thomas spent years working to resolve his debts, the Bankruptcy Court issued a discharge order. The finality of a discharge is one of the historic cornerstones of the consumer bankruptcy process. The City violated Thomas’s discharge by seeking to collect on liens relating to one of his properties. We previously described those debt-collection efforts as a “dereliction.” Thomas v. City of Philadelphia, 759 F. App’x 110, 112 (3d Cir. 2019).1 The District Court also took a dim view. See id. at 111. These proceedings have not assuaged those concerns. What makes this appeal a close call is that in 2013, years after the discharge, the Bankruptcy Court issued a sua sponte ruling relating to a separate property, which wrongly indicated that Thomas had failed to provide the City with constitutionally adequate notice of his bankruptcy plan. We have already held that the Bankruptcy Court’s narrow alternative ruling is not entitled to preclusive effect with respect to the two different properties now at issue. See Thomas v. City of Philadelphia, 682 F. App’x 174, 177-78 (3d Cir. 2017). The City tells us nevertheless that it relied on the Bankruptcy Court’s constitutional surplusage when initiating debt-collection litigation relating to those different properties in state court. Civil contempt is not appropriate when there is an objective, fair ground supporting the violator’s position. The City’s arguments, however, do not clear that threshold based on the unique facts of this case. The Bankruptcy Court was wrong in 2013, and the City’s attempts to suggest otherwise fail. In fact, the City had extensive actual notice of Thomas’s 1 Unless otherwise indicated, case quotations omit all internal citations, quotation marks, footnotes, alterations, and subsequent history. 2 bankruptcy case, including notice of the confirmation hearing, the confirmation order, and the discharge order. In addition to actual notice, the City participated selectively by filing claims as a creditor but skipping key parts of the proceedings. The evidence of the City’s actual notice is so strong that there was no reasonable basis for the City to argue that a due process violation excused compliance with the discharge. Tellingly, the City made no such argument until after the Bankruptcy Court’s 2013 sua sponte ruling. Just as significant to the contempt analysis as the City’s actual notice, if not more so, is the fact that the City improperly tried to extend the 2013 ruling to different properties. We do not here suggest that civil contempt sanctions would be appropriate where a litigant reasonably relies on a judicial decision. But that is not what the City did. The City decided on its own that the Bankruptcy Court’s narrow alternative reasoning applied to other properties too. In doing so, the City violated well-established law b