God only knows how many times we’ve posted on the topic of removal before service, because we can’t count that high. We did take a look through our “removal” topic tag and figured out that our last post about this subject was back in May. Well, a reader recently sent us a new
It was one of our biggest issues in the blog’s first couple of years – whether a defendant’s removal of a case before service on: ( 1) the forum defendant where an out-of-state defendant is sued in its own state’s court, or (2) anybody (including the removing defendant), would result in the unserved forum defendant
By now, everyone but the newest of our readers knows this drill. The client gets sued in state court. The action would be removable, because there’s diversity of citizenship between plaintiff and defendants (that is, they live in different states) except there’s an “in-state” defendant that prevents removal because the plaintiff sued that defendant in
We’ve done so many posts on removal – for you non-lawyers that means moving cases that were originally filed in state court into federal court – that even we have a hard time keeping track. Most of our posts have reviewed individual cases that, one way or another, we’ve learned about. There are 29 posts
We’re running out of headlines for these posts: We’ve already used “Pre-Service Removals — For The Umpteenth Time” and “Pre-Service Removals: They Keep On Coming.”
What’s a blogger to do?
Even if we’ve run out of ideas for creative headlines, we can at least do the non-creative piece of this blogging
At this point, we feel as though we’re obligated to track this issue: When a plaintiff files a complaint in state court that names both residents and non-residents of the forum state as defendants, can the non-resident defendant remove before the resident defendant is served?
When we last posted on this subject, we noted that
We’re fixated on the subject: When a plaintiff files a complaint in state court that names both residents and non-residents of the forum state as defendants, can the non-resident defendant remove before the plaintiff serves the in-state defendant?
(We know that’s cryptic shorthand, but regular readers of this blog have seen more expansive descriptions of
We really shouldn’t complain about the burden after we voluntarily assume a duty.
After all, we created the Drug Preemption Scorecard, the Device Preemption Scorecard, the No Injury Scorecard, and the Cross-Jurisdictional Class Action Tolling Scorecard, and we know that, having created those resources, we’re duty-bound to keep ’em current. (But we’re not your lawyers!
Some blogs are all over Hurricane Gustav.
Some are investigating Sarah Palin.
Some analyze critical issues of the day.
And you’ve come here, where it’s wall-to-wall coverage of whether defendants can remove an action in which a non-resident defendant has been named in a complaint, but not yet served with process.
(We’re not sure whether
We just received this e-mail from a regular visitor to the blog. (We don’t know whether he wants to be identified, so we’re not publishing his name, but the words below are not ours.)
In light of the continued interest in pre-service removal cases, note that both Valerio v. SmithKline Beecham Corp., No. 08-60522-CIV, 2008