IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS

EASTERN DIVISION

AEL FINANCIAL, LLC, )

)

Plaintiff, )

)

v. ) No. 12 C 1020

)

FOURNIER MANAGEMENT, LLC, etc., )

et al., )

)

Defendants. )

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

Steven Prefontaine has filed what his lawyer labels a

“Petition for Removal” to bring this action from its place of 1

origin in the Circuit Court of Lake County to this District

Court. But because the Notice is deficient in its obligation to

establish the existence of federal subject matter jurisdiction,

this Court must--and does--remand the action to its place of

origin in the state court system.

Notice ¶6 properly sets out the Michigan citizenship of both

Steven and Michael Prefontaine, two of the three defendants in

the case. But all that Notice ¶¶4 and 5 state as to plaintiff

AEL Financial, LLC and codefendant Fournier Management, LLC is

this:

 It has been quite a few years since that term was 1

superseded by “notice of removal”--see 28 U.S.C. §1446(a). This

opinion will employ that current vocabulary, referring to the

provisions of the removal document as “Notice ¶--.” While on the

subject of shorthand references, any further citations to

provisions of Title 28 will simply take the form “Section --.”
4. Defendant was at the time of filing of the

State Court action and presently is informed and

believes that AEL FINANCIAL LLC is an Illinois LLC,

with its principal place of business in Illinois. AEL

FINANCIAL is not a citizen of Michigan.

5. Defendant Fournier Management, LLC, was at the

time of filing of the State Court action and presently

is a Michigan LLC with its principal place of business

in the State of Michigan and is a citizen of Michigan.

As that language reflects, those paragraphs speak only of

facts that are jurisdictionally irrelevant when a limited

liability company is involved. Those allegations ignore more

than a baker’s dozen of years of repeated teaching from our Court

of Appeals (see, e.g., Cosgrove v. Bartolotta, 150 F.3d 729, 731

(7 Cir. 1998) and a whole battery of decisions since then, th

exemplified by Hukic v. Aurora Loan Servs., 588 F.3d 420, 427

(7th Cir. 2009) and cases cited there). And that teaching has of

course been echoed many times over by this Court and its

colleagues.

For a good many years this Court was content simply to

identify such failures to lawyers in pursuance of its mandated

obligation to “police subject matter jurisdiction sua sponte”

(Wernsing v. Thompson, 423 F.3d 732, 743 (7 Cir. 2005)). But th

there is really no excuse for defense counsel’s present lack of

knowledge of such a firmly established principle, after well over

a full decade’s repetition by our Court of Appeals and others.

It is of course the burden of the party who seeks to invoke

federal jurisdiction--the plaintiff in any action filed here in

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the first instance, the defendant in any case brought here via

removal--to establish the existence of federal subject matter

jurisdiction. That burden has not been met here, so that Section

1447(c) mandates remand of the case. This Court so orders, and

the Clerk of Court is directed to mail the certified copy of the

order of remand to the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Lake County

forthwith.

________________________________________

Milton I. Shadur

Senior United States District Judge

Date: February 15, 2012

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