We’ve posted twice recently about the potential jurisdictional benefits of the congressionally expanded “federal officer” basis for federal jurisdiction in tort litigation: 28 U.S.C. §1442 (a)(1). Our first post cited in passing Griffin v. Optum, Inc., ___ F.4th ___, 2026 WL 1239289 (8th Cir. May 6, 2026), as an example of courts already applying
Back in 2020, we published a post, “Is It Time To Reconsider Federal Officer Removal?” It discussed a Fifth Circuit asbestos case, Latiolais v. Huntington Ingalls, Inc., 951 F.3d 286 (5th Cir. 2020), overruled prior precedent in light of a congressional amendment to the federal officer removal statute, 28 U.S.C. §1442(a), that
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
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
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
When we heard the other day that Watson v. Philip Morris had been handed down, we weren’t expecting miracles. Watson was one of those cases that you can pretty well tell what’s going to happen from the oral argument – and the oral argument hadn’t given those of us who live on the right side