Civil Procedure & Federal Courts Blog

SCOTUS Oral Argument in TransUnion v. Ramirez

Tomorrow morning, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument (by telephone conference) in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, covered earlier here. It’s a very interesting and important case raising questions of both Article III standing and class certification under FRCP 23.

I was pleased to be involved in a legal scholars’ amicus brief supporting the respondent that addresses the Article III issue in the case. Thanks to a very distinguished group of signatories and some terrific attorneys at Keller Lenkner LLC for making it happen.

If folks want to follow along with the argument tomorrow, here is the Court’s press release about access to the live audio feed.

 

 

 

SCOTUS Cert Grant on Intervention by State AGs to Defend State Laws from Constitutional Challenge

Today the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, limited to the following question:

Whether a state attorney general vested with the power to defend state law should be permitted to intervene after a federal court of appeals invalidates a state statute when no other state actor will defend the law.

You can find all the cert-stage briefing—and follow the merits briefs as they come in—at SCOTUSblog and at the Supreme Court website.

Kalajdzic on Salib on A.I. and Class Actions

Now on the Courts Law section of JOTWELL is Jasminka Kalajdzic’s essay, AI & the End of Lawyers… Defeating Class Certification. Jasminka reviews Peter Salib’s recent article, Artificially Intelligent Class Actions, Tex. L. Rev. (forthcoming).

 

 

SCOTUS Decision in Ford: Personal Jurisdiction

Today the Supreme Court issued its decision in Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court (which is consolidated with a case from Minnesota, Ford Motor Co. v. Bandemer). The Court unanimously upholds personal jurisdiction over Ford in both cases. Justice Kagan writes the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kavanaugh. Justice Alito writes a separate concurring opinion, and Justice Gorsuch writes a separate concurring opinion that is joined by Justice Thomas. (Justice Barrett did not participate.)

More coverage to come, but here’s a very quick recap. Justice Kagan’s majority opinion begins:

In each of these two cases, a state court held that it had jurisdiction over Ford Motor Company in a products-liability suit stemming from a car accident. The accident happened in the State where suit was brought. The victim was one of the State’s residents. And Ford did substantial business in the State—among other things, advertising, selling, and servicing the model of vehicle the suit claims is defective. Still, Ford contends that jurisdiction is improper because the particular car involved in the crash was not first sold in the forum State, nor was it designed or manufactured there. We reject that argument. When a company like Ford serves a market for a product in a State and that product causes injury in the State to one of its residents, the State’s courts may entertain the resulting suit. (emphasis added)

Justice Kagan explains that these cases are proper exercises of specific jurisdiction, and she provides a helpful summary of what specific jurisdiction requires:

The plaintiff’s claims, we have often stated, “must arise out of or relate to the defendant’s contacts” with the forum. Bristol-Myers, 582 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 5) (quoting Daimler, 571 U. S., at 127; alterations omitted); see, e.g., Burger King, 471 U. S., at 472; Helicopteros Nacionales de Colombia, S. A. v. Hall, 466 U. S. 408, 414 (1984); International Shoe, 326 U. S., at 319. Or put just a bit differently, “there must be ‘an affiliation between the forum and the underlying controversy, principally, [an] activity or an occurrence that takes place in the forum State and is therefore subject to the State’s regulation.’” Bristol-Myers, 582 U. S., at ___−___, ___ (slip op., at 5−6, 7) (quoting Goodyear, 564 U. S., at 919).

In applying this test, Justice Kagan rejects the “causation-only approach” put forward by Ford, which would have “locat[ed] specific jurisdiction in the State where Ford sold the car in question, or else the States where Ford designed and manufactured the vehicle.” She notes that in the World-Wide Volkswagen case, “this Court has stated that specific jurisdiction attaches in cases identical to the ones here—when a company like Ford serves a market for a product in the forum State and the product malfunctions there.” 

In the final part of the opinion (II-C), Justice Kagan distinguishes the Supreme Court’s recent decisions rejecting personal jurisdiction in Bristol-Myers and Walden. As she explains: “We found jurisdiction improper in Bristol-Myers because the forum State, and the defendant’s activities there, lacked any connection to the plaintiffs’ claims.” And Walden “had no occasion to address the necessary connection between a defendant’s in-state activity and the plaintiff’s claims” because the defendant had no contacts with the forum state to begin with.

On to the concurring opinions...

Justice Alito agrees that the result in Ford “is settled by our case law” but he expresses a “quibble” with what he calls the “new gloss that the Court puts on our case law.” He writes that the majority “recognizes a new category of cases in which personal jurisdiction is permitted: those in which the claims do not ‘arise out of ‘ (i.e., are not caused by) the defendant’s contacts but nevertheless sufficiently ‘relate to’ those contacts in some undefined way, ante, at 8–9.” He also states that “for the reasons outlined in Justice Gorsuch’s thoughtful opinion, there are grounds for questioning the standard that the Court adopted in International Shoe Co. v. Washington, 326 U. S. 310 (1945)” and that “there are also reasons to wonder whether the case law we have developed since that time is well suited for the way in which business is now conducted.”

Justice Gorsuch’s concurring opinion (joined by Justice Thomas) also takes issue with the majority’s recognition that specific jurisdiction is appropriate when a lawsuit “relates to” the defendant’s activities in the forum. In the second part of the opinion, however, he challenges “the old International Shoe dichotomy” between specific and general jurisdiction, noting “it’s hard not to ask how we got here and where we might be headed.” Justice Gorsuch posits that “the right question” is “what the Constitution as originally understood requires, not what nine judges consider ‘fair’ and ‘just.’” And after surveying pre-International Shoe practice, Justice Gorsuch indicates that the current approach to personal jurisdiction gives corporations “special jurisdictional protections in the name of the Constitution.” In particular:

Even today, this Court usually considers corporations “at home” and thus subject to general jurisdiction in only one or two States. All in a world where global conglomerates boast of their many “headquarters.” The Court has issued these restrictive rulings, too, even though individual defendants remain subject to the old “tag” rule, allowing them to be sued on any claim anywhere they can be found. Burnham, 495 U. S., at 610–611.

Ultimately, Justice Gorsuch agrees that personal jurisdiction is proper in the Ford cases: “The parties have not pointed to anything in the Constitution’s original meaning or its history that might allow Ford to evade answering the plaintiffs’ claims in Montana or Minnesota courts. . . . The real struggle here isn’t with settling on the right outcome in these cases, but with making sense of our personal jurisdiction jurisprudence and International Shoe’s increasingly doubtful dichotomy. On those scores, I readily admit that I finish these cases with even more questions than I had at the start.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emory & Oxford Zoom Series: "Quo Vadis civil justice? Filling the gaps in civil justice in the U.S. and Europe" (March 26, April 30, May 28)

Here is the announcement (H/T Rich Freer):

Emory University School of Law and The University of Oxford’s Center for Socio-Legal Studies Swiss Re Programme for Civil Justice Systems are hosting a three-part Zoom event titled, Quo Vadis civil justice? Filling the gaps in civil justice in the U.S. and Europe. The first event is this Friday, March 26, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon Eastern Daylight Time. The others will follow, respectively, in April and May. The link to register for Friday’s event is below.

The ‘Filling the Gaps’ series will gather lawmakers, policymakers, scholars, business representatives and legal practitioners who will offer insights into the seismic shift the contemporary civil justice systems in Europe and the U.S. are experiencing. They will reflect on the search for just, efficient, and effective civil justice mechanisms, trace the trajectories of reforms, assess the reasons for differences in trajectories, and attempt to answer the perennial question: can we learn from one another?

Panels

Panel 1: Current Trends in Civil Litigation

March 26, 2021 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon (EDT)

The panel discussion explores developments in civil litigation. The recent trends in civil litigation in the U.S. have been the subject of some concern in academia and legal practice. The civil process and courthouses are affected by the growing pressures towards better case management and the omnipresent goal of efficiency. Some key elements of the ‘American procedural exceptionalism’ lost a great deal of their potency. European civil justice policy, while also under pressure from the efficiency advocates, continues to focus on encouraging more litigation. Reforms across Europe reflect movements towards some elements of the American-style (or common law-style) litigation. European lawmakers are looking into, or have already established, new mechanisms encouraging litigation, both on an individual and collective basis.

Speakers

Mary Anne Bobinski (Dean of Emory School of Law)
Christopher Hodges (University of Oxford)
Magdalena Tulibacka (Emory Law)
Sean Farhang (Berkeley Law, University of California)
Richard Freer (Emory Law)
Xandra Kramer (Erasmus School of Law, Rotterrdam)
Malgorzata Posnow-Wurm (European Commission)
John Sorabji (University College London Faculty of Law)
Stefaan Voet (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

To register, please click here.

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Appellate Courts and Civil Juries

The final version of my article, Appellate Courts and Civil Juries, 2021 Wisconsin L. Rev. 1, is now posted. It tackles the question of what standard of review appellate courts should use for findings made by civil juries. There’s a fair amount of confusion on this issue, because some appellate courts have conflated it with the framework for choosing the standard of appellate review for rulings by lower court judges. (The confusion is not helped by the extent to which the often elusive distinction between “law” and “fact” plays a role.)

This is also an issue that the Supreme Court is considering right now in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., a $9 billion lawsuit about Google’s use of Java programming code to develop its Android operating system. SCOTUS issued a specific order asking the parties to brief the appropriate standard of review for the jury’s verdict in favor of Google on its fair use defense. The Google case was argued at the beginning of this Term but is still awaiting a decision—here are some of my thoughts on the case from back in October after the oral argument: SCOTUS, Google v. Oracle, and Appellate Review of Civil Jury Verdicts.

I enjoyed working on this piece, and I hope folks find it helpful. Special thanks to the great editors at the Wisconsin Law Review, who did a fantastic and timely job getting the article finalized—maybe even in time for SCOTUS to read it! Here’s the full abstract:

In federal civil litigation, decisionmaking power is shared by juries, trial courts, and appellate courts. This Article examines an unresolved tension in the different doctrines that allocate authority among these institutions, one that has led to confusion surrounding the relationship between appellate courts and civil juries. At base, the current uncertainty stems from a longstanding lack of clarity regarding the distinction between matters of law and matters of fact. The high-stakes Oracle-Google litigation--which is now before the Supreme Court--exemplifies this. In that case, the Federal Circuit reasoned that an appellate court may assert de novo review over a jury's verdict simply by characterizing a particular issue as legal rather than factual. But this approach misperceives the approach demanded by Rule 50 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which permits judicial override of a jury's verdict only when "a reasonable jury would not have a legally sufficient evidentiary basis" to reach such a verdict.

Rule 50's reasonable-jury standard does not permit de novo review of a jury's verdict on a particular issue. Rather, it requires deference to the jury's conclusion on that issue unless the reviewing court can explain why principles of substantive law or other aspects of the trial record render that verdict unreasonable. This deferential standard of review faithfully implements the text and structure of the Federal Rules and respects the jury's role in our federal system. Yet, it also preserves appellate courts' ability to provide meaningful clarification that will guide future decisionmakers.

 

 

 

SCOTUS Cert Grant on Section 1782 Discovery and Arbitration

Today the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Servotronics, Inc. v. Rolls-Royce PLC, which presents the following question:

Whether the discretion granted to district courts in 28 U.S.C. §1782(a) to render assistance in gathering evidence for use in “a foreign or international tribunal” encompasses private commercial arbitral tribunals, as the Fourth and Sixth Circuits have held, or excludes such tribunals without expressing an exclusionary intent, as the Second, Fifth, and, in the case below, the Seventh Circuit, have held.

You can find all the cert-stage briefing—and follow the merits briefs as they come in—at SCOTUSblog and at the Supreme Court website.

 

 

 

Emory Law Conference on Federal Diversity Jurisdiction (Friday, March 19)

Emory Law School’s Center on Federalism and Intersystemic Governance is hosting a conference on federal diversity jurisdiction this Friday, March 19 (11:20am – 5:40pm Eastern Time).

Here’s the link to register: https://emorylaw.wufoo.com/forms/conference-on-federal-diversity-jurisdiction/

(H/T: Jonathan Nash)

Private Enforcement & Environmental Law: Civil Society Organizations, Public Interests, and Accountability (Online Workshop, Friday 3/12/2021)

Cornell University’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment and the University of Chicago Law School are hosting an online workshop tomorrow (Friday 3/12, 8:15 am – 2:45 pm EST), Private Enforcement & Environmental Law: Civil Society Organizations, Public Interests, and Accountability.

Here’s the registration link: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5bIbkK03QyCy2u_mZge5yQ

More details on this flyer:

Download AD - Private Enforcement Workshop March 12 2021

(H/T: Zach Clopton)

 

 

 

 

Woolhandler & Mahoney on Takings Litigation in Federal Court

Ann Woolhandler and Julia Mahoney have posted on SSRN a draft of their article, Federal Courts and Takings Litigation. Here’s the abstract:

Disagreements about takings claims extend to both substantive and jurisdictional issues. Many advocates of deference to state and local government land use decisions also oppose a significant role for federal courts in adjudicating disputes over these decisions, while a number of property rights advocates argue that federal courts are an appropriate forum for such disputes. These issues were brought into sharp relief by the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Knick v. Township of Scott, which allows property owners to resort to federal court without first pursuing compensation in state court.

While Knick clearly expands the lower federal court role in takings claims, many questions remain, for it is not yet clear whether federal courts will embrace a robust federal judicial role in land use cases. This Article surveys the history of takings claims in the federal courts and recommends that going forward federal courts develop an abstention doctrine particular to takings cases in order to ensure prudent deployment of judicial resources. This Article also explains why § 1331 actions may be superior vehicles for takings cases than § 1983 actions.

 

 

 

SCOTUS Decision on Article III & Nominal Damages: Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski

Today the Supreme Court issued an 8-1 decision in Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, which addresses whether claims for nominal damages can satisfy Article III’s redressibility requirement. They can.

Here are some highlights from Part III of Justice Thomas’s majority opinion:

Because nominal damages were available at common law in analogous circumstances, we conclude that a request for nominal damages satisfies the redressability element of standing where a plaintiff’s claim is based on a completed violation of a legal right. . . .

This is not to say that a request for nominal damages guarantees entry to court. Our holding concerns only redressability. It remains for the plaintiff to establish the other elements of standing (such as a particularized injury); plead a cognizable cause of action, Planck v. Anderson, 5 T. R. 37, 41, 101 Eng. Rep. 21, 23 (K. B. 1792) (“if no [actual] damage be sustained, the creditor has no cause of action” for some claims); and meet all other relevant requirements. We hold only that, for the purpose of Article III standing, nominal damages provide the necessary redress for a completed violation of a legal right.

Applying this principle here is straightforward. For purposes of this appeal, it is undisputed that Uzuegbunam experienced a completed violation of his constitutional rights when respondents enforced their speech policies against him. Because “every violation [of a right] imports damage,” Webb, 29 F. Cas., at 509, nominal damages can redress Uzuegbunam’s injury even if he cannot or chooses not to quantify that harm in economic terms.

Chief Justice Roberts dissents, arguing that Article III is not satisfied because “an award of nominal damages does not alleviate the harms suffered by a plaintiff, and is not intended to.” Even under the majority’s view, however, Roberts contends that “[w]here a plaintiff asks only for a dollar, the defendant should be able to end the case by giving him a dollar, without the court needing to pass on the merits of the plaintiff ’s claims.” And he further asserts that such a defendant might invoke FRCP 68 and thereby “render[] the plaintiff liable for any subsequent costs if he receives only nominal damages.”

Justice Kavanaugh joins the majority opinion, but he writes a one-paragraph concurring opinion endorsing the view—which was also urged by the Solicitor General in this case—that a defendant “should be able to accept the entry of a judgment for nominal damages against it and thereby end the litigation without a resolution of the merits.”

 

 

Michalski on Symeonedes on Choice of Law

Now on the Courts Law section of JOTWELL is Roger Michalski’s essay, Conflict Scholarship in Partisan Times. Roger reviews Symeon Symeonides’ Choice of Law in the American Courts in 2020: Thirty-Fourth Annual Survey, 69 Am. J. Comp. L. (forthcoming 2021).

 

 

 

Today: Alabama Law Review Virtual Symposium, Ten Years of the Supreme Court's Personal Jurisdiction Revival

It’s not too late to register for the Alabama Law Review’s virtual symposium (via Zoom), Ten Years of the Supreme Court’s Personal Jurisdiction Revival. The program will run from 9:00am–3:30pm central time. You can register here.

Hope to see you all soon!

 

 

Unavailability Civil Procedure Workshop Resumes Tuesday, March 2

The Spring 2021 Unavailability Civil Procedure Workshop resumes this Tuesday, March 2, at 3:00pm ET / 2:00pm CT / 1:00pm MT / 12:00pm PT. Beth Burch will discuss Multi-District Litigation.

Hope to see folks there!

 

 

 

Hiring Announcement: VAP at Gonzaga

Agnieszka McPeak shares the following announcement for a VAP position at Gonzaga Law:

Gonzaga Law is hiring a VAP with two or more years' experience. Persons with strong academic records, teaching experience, and the potential for outstanding teaching are encouraged to apply. The position is a 9-month, one-year terminal visiting position beginning in August 2021. The applicant will teach two courses per semester with particular interest in the following: civil procedure, civil rights, administrative law, international law, employment law, international business transactions, and others. Gonzaga University School of Law’s mission and diversity statements are available at: https://www.gonzaga.edu/school-of-law/about/mission-vision.

The successful candidate will teach two courses per semester with particular interest in the following: civil procedure, civil rights, administrative law, international law, employment law, international business transactions, and others. The faculty member will be invited to faculty workshops and other events. More information here: https://gonzaga.peopleadmin.com/postings/15149