Opinion ID: 2824557
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: CAFA Removal Jurisdiction

Text: CAFA extends removal jurisdiction to civil actions in which the “monetary relief claims of 100 or more persons are proposed to be tried jointly,” 28 U.S.C. § 1332(d)(11)(B)(i), except, as potentially relevant here, when “the claims are joined upon motion of a defendant,” id. § 1332(d)(11)(B)(ii)(II), or when “the claims have been consolidated or coordinated solely for pretrial proceedings,” id. 1332(d)(11)(B)(ii)(IV). We must decide whether plaintiffs in any of these five consolidated cases ever proposed to try jointly the claims of one hundred or more persons. See Corber, 771 F.3d at 1223 (noting that the “proposal to try claims jointly must come from the plaintiffs, not from the defendants”). Our answer -20- turns, first, on what it means to make a proposal, and second, on what it means to propose a joint trial.
At the outset, we observe that because § 1332(d)(11)(B)(i) speaks in the passive voice, it is not clear on the face of that subsection, considered alone, who must make a proposal that would trigger CAFA’s mass action removal provision. However, when § 1332(d)(11)(B)(i) is read in conjunction with the exception contained in § 1332(d)(11)(B)(ii)(II), it is clear that a “proposal” within the meaning of § 1332(d)(11)(B)(i) cannot come from a defendant. It is possible that a proposal by a state court for a joint trial would qualify as a “proposal” under § 1332(d)(11)(B)(i). But we need not reach that question, for at no point did the state court move sua sponte to add any of these five cases to the Byetta JCCP. In the cases now before us, the issue is whether plaintiffs made a “proposal” for joint trial sufficient to trigger CAFA’s removal jurisdiction. The district judge identified two actions by plaintiffs that, in his view, constituted implicit proposals for a joint trial. First, in his view, plaintiffs in four of the five cases—Kelly, Kreis, Johnson, and Briggs—had represented to him in the first round of remand proceedings that they intended for their cases to be joined for trial in the Byetta JCCP. Second, plaintiffs in Martinez (along with plaintiffs in -21- the other four cases) filed suit in San Diego Superior Court after defendants initiated the Byetta JCCP in the Los Angeles Superior Court, a court in a neighboring judicial district. We agree with the district judge that implicit proposals may trigger CAFA’s removal jurisdiction. See Corber, 771 F.3d at 1225. But we hold that neither of these actions was an implicit proposal. A proposal for purposes of CAFA’s mass action jurisdiction, even an implicit proposal, is a “voluntary and affirmative act,” id. at 1224, and an “intentional act,” Parson v. Johnson & Johnson, 749 F.3d 879, 888 (10th Cir. 2014). It is “not a mere suggestion,” Scimone v. Carnival Corp., 720 F.3d 876, 883 (11th Cir. 2013), and it is not a mere prediction. Further, and more important, we agree with the Seventh Circuit that, to qualify as a proposal under § 1332(d)(11)(B)(i), a request for a joint trial “must be made to a court that can effect the proposed relief.” In re Abbott Labs., Inc., 698 F.3d 568, 573 (7th Cir. 2012); see Koral v. Boeing Co., 628 F.3d 945, 947 (7th Cir. 2011) (stating that the “proposal must be to the court in which the suits are pending”); see also Corber, 771 F.3d at 1222 (“The statutory issue for us is whether the petitions filed in this case, seeking coordination of the California propoxyphene actions, were in legal effect proposals for those actions to be tried jointly.” (emphasis added)). This interpretation is consistent with the ordinary -22- meaning of the word “propose.” See Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 1819 (2002) (“[T]o propose” means “to offer for consideration, discussion, acceptance, or adoption.”); see Scimone, 720 F.3d at 881 (relying on the Webster’s definition). A plaintiff’s proposal need not take the form of a formal motion for a joint trial. Cf. Tanoh v. Dow Chem. Co., 561 F.3d 945, 954 (9th Cir. 2009) (noting that a defendant’s request to consolidate plaintiffs’ actions falls under § 1332(d)(11)(B)(ii)(II)’s exception even if it is not a formal motion). But if a court lacks the authority to grant a request for a joint trial, then plaintiffs cannot “propose” a joint trial by making a request to that court. From our understanding of the meaning of “proposal,” it follows that nothing the Kreis, Kelly, Johnson, and Briggs plaintiffs represented to the federal district court about what would or might happen to their cases, if they were remanded to state court, qualified as a proposal for a joint trial. (The Martinez plaintiffs did not make any such representation.) At most, the remark made by counsel for Kreis at the hearing to remand the Kreis, Kelly, and Johnson cases was a request to remand those three cases to state court, with the prospect of consolidation with the Byetta JCCP as one reason supporting remand. The statement in a footnote in the Briggs memorandum in support of remand was not even that, for instead of providing a reason for remand, the footnote merely -23- predicted what would happen in the event of a remand. But even if the statement by counsel on behalf of the Kreis, Kelly, and Johnson plaintiffs and the footnote in the Briggs memorandum could be characterized as providing reasons for remand and expressing an intent to seek to join the Byetta JCCP, these statements could not have been “proposals,” given that the district court lacked any authority to join plaintiffs’ cases to the Byetta JCCP. Only California’s Judicial Council and Judge Highberger had the authority to do so. See Corber, 771 F.3d at 1221 n.2 (citing Cal. Civ. Proc. Code §§ 404.1–.9 and Abelson v. Nat’l Union Fire Ins. Co. of Pittsburgh, 35 Cal. Rptr. 2d 13, 18 (Ct. App. 1994)). It also follows from our understanding of “proposal” that plaintiffs in none of the five cases (including Martinez) proposed a joint trial merely by filing their cases in the California state court system, when a consolidated proceeding covering similar claims, initiated by defendants, was underway in a California court. It would strain common sense and stretch the language of § 1332(d)(11)(B)(i) to conclude that plaintiffs were implicitly proposing to join their cases to the Byetta JCCP when they did no more than to file their cases in San Diego Superior Court while the defendant-initiated Byetta JCCP was pending in Los Angeles Superior Court. At most, we can say that plaintiffs filed their complaints with the knowledge that there was a strong likelihood that their cases would be joined in the -24- Byetta JCCP. This likelihood alone cannot to trigger CAFA’s mass action jurisdiction, for some entity—either one of the parties or the state court—would have to take some action to effectuate the joinder. See Anderson v. Bayer Corp., 610 F.3d 390, 394 (7th Cir. 2010) (noting that a proposal for some form of joint trial “seems possible (perhaps even likely) at some future point in these cases, given the similarity of their claims. But it is not yet a certainty, and Congress has forbidden us from finding jurisdiction based on [the defendant’s] suggestion that the claims be tried together”); see also Corber, 771 F.3d at 1224 n.5 (“[W]e must determine whether Plaintiffs proposed a joint trial, not whether one will occur at some future date.”). The statute tells us that it matters who or what that entity is. It makes clear that if it were a defendant who petitioned to add the cases to the Byetta JCCP, the cases would not constitute a mass action. 28 U.S.C. § 1332(d)(11)(B)(ii)(II) (“[T]he term ‘mass action’ shall not include any civil action in which . . . the claims are joined upon motion of a defendant.”). If we were to agree with the district court that plaintiffs proposed a joint trial merely by filing their actions in state court, we would transform plaintiffs from masters of their complaints into servants of defendants’ litigation strategy. In effect, we would permit defendants to lock later-filing plaintiffs out of state court systems by preemptively initiating coordinated judicial proceedings in earlier-filed -25- state court suits. Neither the text nor the purpose of CAFA contemplates such a result. “[T]here is no indication that Congress’s purpose in enacting CAFA was to strip plaintiffs of their ordinary role as masters of their complaint and allow defendants to treat separately filed actions as one action regardless of plaintiffs’ choice.” Scimone, 720 F.3d at 885; see Tanoh, 561 F.3d at 953 (“In this case, concluding that plaintiffs’ claims fall outside CAFA’s removal provisions is not absurd, but rather is consistent with . . . the well-established rule that plaintiffs, as masters of their complaint, may choose their forum by selecting state over federal court . . . .”). The actions of plaintiffs in these cases—filing separate suits in San Diego Superior Court when a similar, but not identical, set of cases was pending in a JCCP in Los Angeles Superior Court—are a far cry from what other circuits have held sufficient to trigger removal as a mass action under CAFA. See, e.g., Atwell v. Bos. Sci. Corp., 740 F.3d 1160, 1161, 1163 (8th Cir. 2013) (explaining that CAFA jurisdiction lies where plaintiffs requested that their cases, which together included more than one hundred plaintiffs, be assigned “to a single Judge for purposes of discovery and trial”); Visendi, 733 F.3d at 868 (holding that CAFA jurisdiction lies where plaintiffs “filed a single state-court complaint that named well over 100 plaintiffs”); Bullard v. Burlington N. Santa Fe Ry. Co., 535 F.3d 759, 761–62 (7th -26- Cir. 2008) (recognizing that CAFA jurisdiction lies where plaintiffs filed a complaint on behalf of 144 plaintiffs); see also Scimone, 720 F.3d at 884 (“Every other court of appeals confronted with this question has come to the same conclusion: that plaintiffs have the ability to avoid § 1332(d)(11)(B)(i) jurisdiction by filing separate complaints naming less than 100 plaintiffs and by not moving for or otherwise proposing joint trial in the state court.”). We therefore conclude that none of the plaintiffs “proposed” a joint proceeding within the meaning of § 1332(d)(11)(B)(I), either when they made representations to the federal court or when they filed suit in state court.
Because we do not agree with the district court’s conclusion that plaintiffs’ representations in federal court and their decision to file their cases in California state court constituted implicit proposals to try jointly the claims of one hundred or more persons, we reach a question the district court had no need to answer: Did the plaintiffs in Kreis trigger CAFA’s mass action jurisdiction by filing a petition in state court to join the Byetta JCCP? While Corber held that an initial petition for a JCCP can constitute a proposal, it is not clear whether an add-on petition can constitute a proposal as well—particularly where, as here, the claims in the add-on petition would not meet -27- CAFA’s hundred-person threshold unless added to claims that had previously been joined “upon motion of a defendant.” 28 U.S.C. § 1332(d)(11)(B)(ii)(II). We need not reach that issue, however, for even if the Kreis plaintiffs’ add-on petition could be construed as a proposal, it was not a proposal for a joint trial. See Corber, 771 F.3d at 1224 (observing that not all JCCP petitions are “per se proposals to try cases jointly”). Their add-on petition comes within the scope of the exception in § 1332(d)(11)(B)(ii)(IV), which excepts from the “mass action” definition “claims that have been consolidated or coordinated solely for pretrial purposes.” We wrote in Corber, “We can envision a [JCCP] petition that expressly seeks to limit its request for coordination to pre-trial matters, and thereby align with the mass action provision’s exception [under] § 1332(d)(11)(B)(ii)(IV).” Id. We went on to observe that “if Plaintiffs had qualified their coordination request by saying that it was intended to be solely for pre-trial purposes, then it would be difficult to suggest that Plaintiffs had proposed a joint trial.” Id. The Kreis plaintiffs qualified their petition in just this manner. In a declaration attached to the Kreis add-on petition, plaintiffs’ counsel stated that plaintiffs “do not seek joint trials of any cases or plaintiffs, but rather, all claims shall be tried individually.” Unlike the Corber plaintiffs, the Kreis plaintiffs did not explain that they sought to join the JCCP in order to avoid “inconsistent judgments.” Id. at 1223–24. Rather, -28- they stated that they wanted to avoid “inconsistent rulings.” “Rulings” is a broader term than “judgments,” including various dispositions of pre-trial motions. Our conclusion that the Kreis plaintiffs did not seek a joint trial is confirmed by the nature of the proceeding they sought to join. The August 2010 case management order in the Byetta JCCP, which explicitly applies to later filed addon cases, states that the order “does not constitute a determination that these actions should be consolidated for trial.” We recognize that the Byetta plaintiffs submitted a status conference report in June 2014—after the plaintiffs in four of the five cases, including Kreis, had filed suit—in which the Byetta plaintiffs represented that they “have said several times that a small group of bellwethers provide an extremely useful and practical backdrop and context for the many issues that will arise as the [pancreatic cancer] cases progress, including the generic causation phase.” A bellwether trial is a test case that is typically used to facilitate settlement in similar cases by demonstrating the likely value of a claim or by aiding in predicting the outcome of tricky questions of causation or liability. See Alexandra D. Lahav, Bellwether Trials, 76 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 576, 577–78 (2008). Ordinary principles of collateral estoppel may apply in subsequent cases, but we agree with Judge Battaglia that a bellwether trial is not, without more, a joint trial within the meaning of CAFA. Compare Atwell, 740 F.3d at 1163–66 -29- (affirming the denial of motions to remand where three sets of plaintiffs filed motions proposing that the state court assign all three cases “to a single Judge for purposes of discovery and trial,” and where plaintiffs’ counsel discussed bellwether case selection at a hearing in state court); Abbott Labs., 698 F.3d at 571, 573 (reversing an order granting a motion to remand where plaintiffs moved for consolidation “through trial” and “not solely for pretrial proceedings,” in part to “prevent inconsistent . . . trial rulings”); Bullard, 535 F.3d at 762 (stating that “[a] trial of 10 exemplary plaintiffs, followed by application of issue or claim preclusion to 134 more plaintiffs without another trial, is one in which the claims of 100 or more persons are being tried jointly,” in the course of holding that a single complaint identifying 144 plaintiffs constitutes a proposal for a joint trial (emphasis added)). Thus, even if we were to impute the Byetta plaintiffs’ expressed wish for bellwether trials to the Kreis plaintiffs, that would not transform the Kreis plaintiffs’ add-on petition into a proposal for a joint trial.