We rarely get riled up about a decision related to removals and remands. A rejection of snap removal or a misapplication of Ruhrgas might quicken our nerdy pulses, but not engender our sense of outrage like many, many other things we have posted about through the years. However, we read a decision where a veteran district judge in the Central District of California, a court notorious for its hostility to removal on fraudulent joinder, sua sponte remanded a case that had been removed based on diversity. Not only did the plaintiffs not move to remand, but there was no indication from the decision or the docket that the court requested any briefing or evidentiary submissions. Yet, the court remanded the case because the Notice of Removal—the only part of the record other than the complaint cited in the decision—did not include evidence establishing the jurisdictional minimum for the amount in controversy.
The case is Mehram v. ICU Med. Inc., No. 8:26-cv-01282-DOC-JDE, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 124084 (C.D. Cal. June 3, 2026), and it relates to product liability claims against a device manufacturer over the hypoxic brain injury and eventual death of a young child. If your reaction is that this is just about the last case where anyone would question that more than $75,000 was at stake, then just wait. A five year old British child with significant medical issues requiring constant ventilation using defendant’s tracheostomy tube suffered hypoxia and cardiac arrest allegedly due to a failure of the device and despite medical intervention. After being hospitalized for twenty five days, she was declared clinically brain dead, her organs began to shut down, and she died. More than four years later, her parents brought a product liability, wrongful death, and survival action against the manufacturer’s parent company in California state court. The defendant filed a timely removal based on complete diversity—U.K. plaintiffs and a California defendant. That was all from the decision. Id. at *2-3. It does not say what damages the plaintiffs sought, so we dug a little. From the docket and complaint, as well as the silence in the decision, we see that the plaintiff never moved to remand, the plaintiff never actually contested that the jurisdictional minimum was met, and the parties were never asked to brief or submit evidence relating to the jurisdictional minimum before the court issued its sua sponte order of remand within two weeks of the case being assigned. We also see that the complaint contained a wide range of damages claims related to the decedent’s pain and suffering, her parents’ emotional distress, her parents’ loss of her love, services, and financial contributions over the course of her life, funeral and burial expenses, and all other expenses incurred, presumably including medical expenses. (The care was all in Birmingham, England, so medical expenses are quite different than in the U.S., but U.K. governmental payors can still recover expenses from tortfeasors under mechanisms roughly akin to our lien system.) It is true, though, that the complaint, like most U.S. product liability complaints, included specific dollar figures (and no pounds) only when discussing the defendant’s business.
Based on its review of the notice of removal and complaint and its interpretation of old caselaw, the Mehram court concluded that,
Defendant does not provide any concrete facts showing that Plaintiff’s alleged injuries might result in damages over $75,000. Defendant recites the extent of Plaintiff’s injuries, Not. at 4, but does not connect these alleged injuries to any specific amount of damages. While Plaintiff might have suffered injuries warranting an amount over $75,000, the record before the Court today does not support that.
Id. at *7. This quote was followed by a citation to a 2003 Ninth Circuit case called Matheson. The court also noted that the complaint does not “demand a specific amount of damages or otherwise indicate that Plaintiff is seeking more than $75,000.” Id. at *6-7. That is it for Mehram’s analysis, although the court did implore Congress to up the jurisdictional minimum from the $75,000 it has been since 1996.
The basic legal issue here is that Mehram applied the wrong legal standard because the cases on removal it cited stopped in 2010. In 2014, the Supreme Court decided Dart Cherokee Basin Operating Co., LLC v. Owens, 574 U.S. 81 (2014). The second paragraph of Judge Ginsburg’s concise opinion states:
To assert the amount in controversy adequately in the removal notice, does it suffice to allege the requisite amount plausibly, or must the defendant incorporate into the notice of removal evidence supporting the allegation? That is the single question argued here and below by the parties and the issue on which we granted review. The answer, we hold, is supplied by the removal statute itself. A statement “short and plain” need not contain evidentiary submissions.
Id. at 84. So, the cases Mehram cited about the removing party’s evidentiary burden had been overruled more than a decade ago and its resulting analysis was wrong. Dart also stated, “In sum, as specified in §1446(a), a defendant’s notice of removal need include only a plausible allegation that the amount in controversy exceeds the jurisdictional threshold. Evidence establishing the amount is required by §1446(c)(2)(B) only when the plaintiff contests, or the court questions, the defendant’s allegation.” Id. at 89. It even quoted text establishing Congress’s intent in adding language about evidence in §1446(c)(2)(B: “Rather, defendants may simply allege or assert that the jurisdictional threshold has been met. Discovery may be taken with regard to that question. In case of a dispute, the district court must make findings of jurisdictional fact to which the preponderance standard applies.” Id. at 88-89. In Mehram, because the plaintiffs did not move to remand or otherwise claim that their case was worth less than $75,000, defendant never had to come forward with evidence on the issue. It would have made no sense for the notice of removal to include such evidence, given that, as Dart noted, “Of course, a dispute about a defendant’s jurisdictional allegations cannot arise until after the defendant files a notice of removal containing those allegations.” Id. at 89.
So, Mehram was really wrong and the court’s sua sponte treatment of remand deprived it of the chance to be told about the current law, receive evidence on the amount at issue, allow discovery to elucidate that issue, or even be told by plaintiffs that they did seek well over the jurisdictional amount. However, what galls us even more is that the complaint makes it very clear that the parents of a deceased child who suffered “catastrophic” injuries and was hospitalized for close to a month before she died had filed a case that sought more than $75,000. The law we see in removals around the country generally recognizes that personal injury claims alleging the expected types of economic and non-economic damages for “severe bodily injuries” are sufficient absent a clear statement in the complaint that damages above $75,000 are not being sought. We have never seen a court require evidence that a claim that the defendant’s drug or device killed someone was worth more than $75,000. As defense lawyers, we are sometimes accused of being heartless, lacking empathy, being unswayed by emotion, etc. Yet, imagine how crass we would be accused of being if we loaded up a notice of removal in a case like Mehram with a exhibit-backed financial breakdown of what claims for catastrophic injury and wrongful death of a young child were worth.
Based on some internet searching and substituting general California numbers for Birmingham, England, where plaintiffs live or Orange County, where they sued, we pulled some numbers relevant to plaintiffs’ alleged damages. The cost of a 26-day hospital stay in California in 2024 averaged between $80,000 and $132,000, depending on the type of hospital. ICU stays typically cost twice that and, we assume, pediatric ICU stays cost even more. Would that need to be included or would a common sense reading of the complaint have indicated that the medical expenses for the plaintiffs’ decedent exceeded the jurisdictional minimum? A “traditional” funeral in California averages about $8000, whereas a “full” funeral is twice that. Does that need to be included in the purportedly necessary tally in the notice of removal? As a five year old female in 2023, U.S. government life tables indicate that plaintiffs’ decedent would have lived an average of another 76.55 years. Should that be mentioned when discussing how the claims for the parents’ loss of the love and support of their daughter tallied up? What about medical details on the pain and suffering associated with cardiac arrest and hypoxic brain injury? If there were a trial, then all of these types of damages would be presented to the jury. Before removal, should the defendant have filed a motion for more definite statement to make the complaint include dollar amounts whenever it discussed claimed damages? Should the defendant have served a request for admission that the case sought more than $75,000 in damages? We submit that it would be ludicrous, if not cruel, for any of this to be required to justify the jurisdictional minimum in a diversity removal as mandated by the misguided Mehram decision. The Dart requirement that “a defendant’s notice of removal need include only a plausible allegation that the amount in controversy exceeds the jurisdictional threshold” makes way more sense. It is a good thing that Dart is the law and Mehram is not.