Ahmed

Opinion by Judge TASHIMA; Dissent by Judge NOONAN.

ORDER

Judge Noonan’s concurrence in the opinion, filed on August 28, 2001, and reported at 262 F.3d 979 , is withdrawn and his separate, dissenting opinion is filed herewith.

OPINION

Plaintiff-Appellee Dr. Tariq Ahmed brought suit in federal district court against Defendants-Appellants Washington Department of Social and Health Services (“DSHS”) and two of its supervisory employees under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for al *466 leged violation of his First Amendment rights. He ultimately won a jury verdict for $8,026,009. We have jurisdiction over this appeal pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1291 , and we reverse.

I. BACKGROUND

Most of the facts in this case are disputed and, on at least some issues, there may be inconsistent sets of facts that have been found by different tribunals, federal and state. For. this reason, we begin with the procedural background.

Ahmed was terminated from his position with DSHS on January 10, 1997. Five days later, he appealed his termination to the state Personnel Appeals Board (“PAB”). On July 1, 1997, while the administrative appeal was still pending, Ahmed filed a complaint against DSHS and two of his…

dissenting:

This case presents a quantum expansion of what is conventionally known as the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. It is an expansion as undesirable as it is unwarranted.

FACTS

Testimony as to some of the following was in conflict. This summary presents what two federal juries must have found as fact in order to render two separate, substantial verdicts for Ahmed:

On May 20, 1994, Tariq Ahmed began work as a physician at the Rainier School for the disabled. On April 16, 1996, he filed a formal incident report noting that for five months Paul H’s possible urinary tract infection had not been treated. He added that, during his two years at the school, 80% of the tests he had ordered for patients with diarrhea had not been performed.

Rainier was a state school with a large amount of federal funding. It had twice been decertified for such funding because of perceived deficiencies in its treatment of its patients. A formal incident report in its files was a threat to its funding, and Ahmed had been warned by the school’s administration not to file such reports. He, on the other hand, believed that many of the disabled patients had difficulty protecting themselves, and that he…