Rodriguez Remand

We posted here about Howard Wasserman's piece over at the Sports Law Blog about WVU's breach of contract suit against former football coach (Now Michigan football coach) Rich Rodriguez because it involved an interesting removal issue.  You can check out Howard's follow-up to his earlier piece here.  Howard goes into more and better detail, but the long and short of it is that the federal district court remanded the lawsuit to the West Virginia state court.  Rodriguez had removed the case claiming he was a Michigan citizen and, thus, diversity of citizenship existed between him and the West Virginia Plaintiff. 

The purpose of diversity of citizenship jurisdiction is to protect the out-of-state defendant from local prejudice.  The district court here did not end up determining Rodriguez's citizenship (remanding on other grounds, as Howard explains), but, after reading this piece, I suspect Rodriguez is going to feel some local prejudice in West Virginia no matter what his citizenship happens to be.--Counseller