Opinion ID: 1023859
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Heading Rank: 1

Heading: By any resident of this State for any cause of

Text: action; or (2) By a plaintiff not a resident of this State when the cause of action shall have arisen or the subject of the action shall be situated within this state. S.C. Code Ann. § 15-5-150. As recently reinterpreted by the Supreme Court of South Carolina in Farmer v. Monsanto Corp., 579 S.E.2d 325 (S.C. 2003), § 15-5-150 determines the capacity of a party to sue. Furthermore, Farmer held that “§ 15-5-150 controls the eligibility of class members in a class action where the defendant is a foreign corporation.” 579 S.E.2d at 559. For suits in South Carolina state court, the effect of Farmer is to limit class membership to those persons who would have had capacity to sue for themselves. In ruling on Ward’s motion for class certification, the district court concluded that § 15-5-150 prevented Ward from representing out-of-state plaintiffs. The district court reached this conclusion by relying on our prior decisions stating that “a South Carolina federal court exercising diversity jurisdiction must apply § 15-5-150 ‘unless there are affirmative countervailing 14 federal considerations.’” Proctor & Schwartz, Inc. v. Rollins, 634 F.2d 738, 739-40 (4th Cir. 1980) (quoting Szantay v. Beech Aircraft Corporation, 349 F.2d 60, 64 (4th Cir. 1965)). Our decisions in Proctor & Schwartz and Szantay, however, interpreted the door-closing statute in light of the then-prevailing understanding that § 15-5-150 restricted not capacity to sue but the subject matter jurisdiction of state courts. In Farmer the Supreme Court of South Carolina overruled its prior cases stating that § 15-5-150 dealt with jurisdiction. In this case, we do not find it necessary to decide what effect the reinterpreted door-closing statute has on class membership in suits being heard in South Carolina federal courts sitting in diversity. This is so because, as we discuss next, Ward has failed to establish that the proposed multistate class meets Rule 23(b)(3)’s requirement that common legal issues predominate.