On Tuesday May 28, 2019, the United State Supreme Court declined to afford state court third-party, class action defendants the ability to remove a class action to federal court. See Home Depot U.S.A., Inc. v. Jackson, 17-1471 (May 28, 2019).
In Jackson, Citibank, N.A., filed a debt-collection action against George Jackson in North…
Any good litigator can tell you that removal is proper where there is diversity of citizenship and the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000. Diversity generally requires that no defendant be a citizen of the same state as the plaintiff. By way of example, consider a lawsuit filed by Paul, a Pennsylvania citizen, in Pennsylvania state…
As it turns out, Chicago poet and journalist Carl Sandburg is one of–if not the–first person to be credited with an old piece of advice for lawyers:
If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound
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When the Rules Committee amended Rule 23 in 1998 to allow for interlocutory appeals, it made them discretionary. The result, as I’ve written before, is that class action litigators have had to make these appeals attractive to appellate courts in much the same way that appellate litigators must prepare certiorari petitions.
But, as it…
Thurgood Marhshall was, of course, a Justice of the Supreme Court. But before that, he was an absolutely incredible litigator; he was the primary strategist behind the NAACP’s litigation campaign to desegregate public institutions. In the wake of his victory in Brown v. Board of Education, he published The Rise & Collapse of the …
This week, we ask the question: what happens to a class action after the defendants win an appeal?
The case posing this question is Glaberson v. Comcast Corp., No. 03-6604, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 160892 (E.D. Pa. Nov. 12, 2013). And the facts should be familiar: Glaberson is the current name for the case…
Earlier this year, Professor Arthur Miller published a summary of developments in civil procedure over the last several years, entitled Simplified Pleading, Meaningful Days in Court, and Trials on the Merits: Reflections on the Deformation of Federal Procedure.
Professor Miller is one of the giants of civil procedure. He may or may not have…
Longtime readers may remember that last February I had the pleasure of participating in the DePaul Law Review’s symposium on Class Action Rollback. The article from that symposium will be appearing shortly in the DePaul Law Review, and a very late draft of it is now available at SSRN. Without further comment…
The Economist is reporting that the French president Francois Hollande’s government just presented a class action bill to the Council of Ministers on May 2. While the bill still must be debated and passed, it has already generated a fair amount of buzz in Europe about whether this means that the French Socialist government…
As Colorado Law Professor Paul Campos has observed, it has rapidly become a cliche that law schools are in crisis. They charge too much, and they don’t prove adequate training or job placement in return. As a result, they are losing enrollees quickly, which means that a number of them may have to…
