Today’s guest post from Justin Kadoura, a Holland & Knight product liability and toxic tort litigator, concerns a Supreme Court decision on an issue that might seem unrelated to the sort of case we cover at the DDL Blog.  However, federal officer removal does come up in our cases and we have covered it…

It is a simple fact that product liability plaintiffs almost always prefer state court and product liability defendants almost always prefer federal court.  This is a major reason why removal fights, sometimes intertwined with personal jurisdiction fights, happen so often in these types of cases.  Another reason is that product liability plaintiff lawyers like to…

One way to remove a case to federal court that we haven’t discussed much is where the defendant is either a “federal officer” (not terribly relevant to our line of work), or else is a “person acting under that officer . . . for or relating to any act under color of such office.”  28…

We have written many times, as recently as Tuesday, that the practice of plaintiff lawyers to include patently inapplicable claims among a laundry list of causes of action asserted in complaints is lazy, if not problematic.  It is rare to see a plaintiff self-regulate and cull down an overbroad pleading without a defense motion…

Federal officer jurisdiction is the quiet middle child of the federal jurisdiction family.  We all came out of law school fully versed in federal question jurisdiction and diversity jurisdiction (and we also vividly recall our civil procedure professor using Wyoming and Colorado for all his hypotheticals on diversity of citizenship because those were the only…

We are medical device and pharmaceutical lawyers, so preemption is our thing.  It may not make for scintillating cocktail conversation, but we find the intersection between Constitutional law (the Supremacy Clause and the federal/state balance of power) and public policy issues (health and safety, and regulation versus litigation as the best way to promote…