If it’s Wednesday, it’s plainly time to talk about removal. Today’s case, In re Depo Provera Prods Liab. Litigation, 2025 WL 3252445 (N.D. Fla. Nov. 13, 2025), upholds one of the defense bar’s favorite procedural maneuvers,snap removal. The case was snapped in California, in the Ninth Circuit, and transferred to the Multidistrict Litigation in
Here is another post from our junior blogger-in-training, Dean Balaes. He tackles one of the blog’s favorite subjects, removal before service to bring our readers the skinny on the first case where a plaintiff attempted to interpose a COVID-19 objection to snap removal, unsuccessfully. Since other plaintiffs might try the same thing, that makes
We have always puzzled over why pre-service removals are the least bit controversial. We are referring to what are known as “snap removals,” or removals to federal court before any forum defendant has been served. They are one way to comply with the removal statute’s forum defendant rule. It’s pretty simple: Even when you have
Our recent post on “wrinkle removal” – that is, removal before service – case got us thinking. The opinion discussed in that post, Dechow v. Gilead Sciences, Inc., ___ F. Supp.3d ___, 2019 WL 5176243 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 8, 2019), was out of California, in the Ninth Circuit. That didn’t keep Dechow from citing
On August 17, 2018, we observed in our latest comprehensive post on pre-service removal, that “[w]ith Court of Appeals decisions now breaking in our favor, we can start trying to change the minds of district courts that have previously gone the other way.”
And how.
On August 22 – less than a week after that
It’s been a while since we’ve discussed pre-service removal, other than to mention a recent case. Our last major post was “What’s up with Removal Before Service,” back in May 2011.
Since then, we pointed out an important statutory development – that when Congress rewrote other parts of the removal statute (28 U.S.C.
Recently, in downsizing our elderly father to a smaller residence and cleaning out his house, we came upon a cassette recording of our too-many-decades-ago Bat Mitzvah. We dug an old boom box out of the basement, listened to our sweet 13-year-old voice, and allowed the waves of nostalgia to wash over us. We remembered the
This post comes from the Cozen O’Connor side of the blog.
We’ve been blogging about “removal before service” since we announced it to the world in 2007. It’s a procedural tactic that enables defendants to remove cases to federal court despite the “forum defendant rule,” which ordinarily prohibits a defendant from removing to federal
We’ve learned of another win for removal before service in our local federal court, the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. In Boyer v. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Inc., C.A. No. 12-739, slip op. (E.D. Pa. April 25, 2011), the case was removed “before any defendant had been served.” Id. at 1. The plaintiff sued Pfizer, a non-Pennsylvania
There hasn’t been a lot of talk about this, but Congress just passed, and the President signed, something called the” Federal Courts Jurisdiction and Venue Clarification Act of 2011,” H. R. 394, P.L 112-63, copy here. As far as we’re concerned, this new act (we’ll call it, creatively, “the Act”) is as significant for what it didn’t do as for what it did.
The Act completely rewrote 28 U.S.C. §1441(b). Why’s that important? Because the literal language of §1441(b) – “removable only if none of the parties in interest properly joined and served is a citizen of the State in which such action is brought” – is what allows removal prior to service to trump the so-called “forum defendant” loophole. As we’ve pointed out in many posts (most of which you can access from here), the “and served” qualifier to the forum defendant loophole means that, if an otherwise diverse action is removed before an in-state defendant is served, then that defendant’s citizenship, according to the statute, must be ignored and the action is properly in federal court.
That’s the express language of the statute. The plaintiffs have responded with a mushy, result-oriented counter-argument that surely Congress didn’t mean what it said; that result would be absurd. As we’ve mentioned, some benighted courts have bought that rationale.
Well, that argument just went out the window. Why? Because in the Act (the 2011 one mentioned above), Congress had the opportunity to change §1441(b) if it was uncomfortable with the result dictated by that section’s express terms. It didn’t. Quite the contrary, while Congress completely rewrote §1441(b) in the Act, it retained (and arguably improved, see this law review article, pp. 162-63) the “properly filed and served” language verbatim in the new version. After the Act, here’s how §1441(b) now reads:
(b) REMOVAL BASED ON DIVERSITY OF CITIZENSHIP. – (1) In determining whether a civil action is removable on the basis of the jurisdiction under section 1332(a) of this title, the citizenship of defendants sued under fictitious names shall be disregarded.
(2) A civil action otherwise removable solely on the basis of the jurisdiction under section 1332(a) of this title may not be removed if any of the parties in interest properly joined and served as defendants is a citizen of the State in which such action is brought.
Act §103(a)(3) (emphasis added).Continue Reading Removal News