It’s been a been a while – some five years – since we discussed cross-jurisdictional class action tolling.  That’s mostly because, aside from the occasional result-oriented atrocity that occurred in the Valsartan MDL, class actions are no longer a top-shelf problem in prescription medical product liability litigation.  But it’s still nice to report on a major appellate decision from a large state giving that novel theory the boot.

That’s precisely what happened in on Halloween in Ackerman v. Arkema, Inc., 157 F.4th 715 (5th Cir. 2025).  Ackerman involved allegations of environmental pollution, not prescription medical product liability litigation.  Shortly after the event, some attorney purporting to represent residents filed a class action in federal court seeking both damages and injunctive relief less than a month after the explosions that allegedly caused the pollution.  Id. at 716.  The federal district court only certified the class for injunctive relief – hardly what the lawyers were primarily after – since monetary relief for different property damage claims isn’t the sort of common injury that supports a class action.  Id.

In 2024, some two years after the injunctive class settled, “800 members of [that] class filed individual actions in Texas state court seeking monetary damages.”  Id.  These claims were admittedly filed “almost six years after they had accrued,” long after the applicable two-year statute of limitations had expired.  Id.  But the plaintiffs claimed that the federal class action – which had never been certified as to property damage claims – somehow trumped the Texas statute and tolled Texas state-law claims brought in  state court.

That’s called “cross-jurisdictional class action tolling,” and Texas (like most states) had never permitted a class action filed in some other court system (here, a federal court) to toll its own statute of limitations in its own courts.  After these 800 claims were removed on diversity grounds to federal court, the trial court rejected their tolling arguments “because Texas law does not recognize cross-jurisdictional tolling of the statute of limitations.”  Id.

The Fifth Circuit has affirmed, rejecting the plaintiffs’ proposed reliance on “policy considerations” to justify their claimed federal procedural impingement on the Texas state statute of limitations.  As our cross-jurisdictional class action tolling scorecard indicates, while the issue has never reached the Texas Supreme Court, state and federal appellate courts have unanimously rejected such tolling.  See Bell v. Showa Denko K.K., 899 S.W.2d 749, 757-58 (Tex. App. 1995); Newby v. Enron Corp., 542 F.3d 463, 472 (5th Cir. 2008); Vaught v. Showa Denko K.K., 107 F.3d 1137, 1147 (5th Cir. 1997).  Adhering to this “binding precedent,” Ackerman, refused plaintiffs’ invitation to expand Texas law.  157 F.4th  at 717.  “state rules for tolling are based on state, not federal, law,” thus “Texas courts would not toll the state statute of limitations in light of a federal class action.”  Id. at 718 (citation and quotation marks omitted).

Plaintiffs “policy” claims were simply reprises of arguments that prior decisions had already considered and rejected:

Appellants’ arguments that there are exceptions to this bar on cross-jurisdictional tolling − such as when certain types of claims are at issue or when defendants have fair notice of the claims − are unavailing.  Newby considered and rejected such arguments, expressly abrogating district court cases holding that Texas courts would allow cross-jurisdictional tolling for property-related claims or where defendants had fair notice.  In the absence of any subsequent Texas decisions rendering our Erie guesses in Vaught and Newby clearly incorrect, we adhere to their holdings.

Id.  Nor was cross-jurisdictional class action tolling a “close question” that would warrant certification to the Texas Supreme Court where neither party sought such relief.  Id. at 718 n.2.