Removal-rama continues. Art (if that is what you can call blogposting) mimics life. We have not just been blogging about removal cases lately, we’ve also been removing cases to federal court with startling frequency. And it’s been working. Twice, even with a removal basis that might be characterized as a jump ball, plaintiffs have not
Today’s guest post is from Dechert’s Chris McKeon who updates us on a rare application of the political question doctrine. As always, our guest posters deserve 100% of the praise (and any of blame) for their posts. Not that we expect the latter.
******
In our earlier post, we explored whether the political question
Mulitdistrict litigations – both federal MDLs and their state-court equivalents – sound like noble endeavors. The concept is simple: consolidate similar lawsuits under one judge to streamline proceedings. This, in theory, avoids contradictory rulings and saves court resources. But when you pan out past the injured plaintiffs and mountains of medical records, you’ll spot one
When a defendant removes a case to federal court on the basis that the case presents federal questions, what happens if the plaintiff amends the complaint to remove all references to federal law, leaving only state-law claims? The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that once the plaintiff amends to delete all federal claims, a federal
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
Those of us who took Con Law as first year law students may recall Marbury v. Madison as an early test of the Supreme Court’s place in our nascent republic. Alliteration being a mnemonic device, some may recall that Madison was Secretary of State James Madison and the decision was written by Chief Justice John
As insightful and modest as the Blog can be, we are not infallible. Every once in a while, two posts get written on the same decision, sometimes because we try to make sure a new post goes up every non-holiday weekday of the year. Because of the aforementioned modesty, however, we are hesitant to deprive
Law school exams are usually exercises in issue spotting. Buried within the fact scenarios are various legal issues. The student earns points by identifying those issues and discussing how they should be resolved. Sequence also matters. It makes sense to walk through threshold issues, such as jurisdiction, first.
Goins v. Saint Elizabeth Medical Center, Inc.
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