As readers of this blog know, we’ve been strangely fascinated by the spat over whether in-state defendants (whose presence in a lawsuit would ordinarily prevent removal) can remove actions to federal court before those defendants are served with the complaint.
For examples of our fascination, see here, here, here, and here.
On the one hand, there’s the plain language of the statute.
On the other hand, some courts think that a literal reading of the statute would yield “a bizarre result” that “cannot possibly have been the intent of the legislature.”
So some courts follow the language, and others ignore it. The law becomes a muddle.
When we get ourselves worked up in a lather, we just won’t stop.
We saw the case of Thomson v. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp., No. 06-6280 (JBS), 2007 WL 1521138 (D.N.J. May 22, 2007), last year, and couldn’t believe that the world had overlooked the issue: Plaintiff files a complaint naming multiple defendants in, say,
We posted (and again here) earlier this week about the New Jersey federal trial court decision in Thomson v. Novartis, which permitted defendants to remove seemingly non-removable diversity cases, so long as the cases were removed before plaintiff effected service on the in-state defendants.
We saw room for mischief there. (Indeed, folks on
We posted about Thomson v. Novartis on Sunday, noting that it was an odd case analyzing an unusual removal issue.
The Civil Procedure Prof Blog saw our post and agreed that the issue was unusual.
Apparently, however, the issue won’t be unusual for long. We received this note from a reader:
I read your post
This post does not announce late-breaking news. Given the speed at which information travels on the web, an opinion decided in May is ancient history. But the world seems to have overlooked the implications of Thomson v. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp., No. 06-6280 (JBS), 2007 WL 1521138 (D.N.J. May 22, 2007), so we’re here to