Opinion ID: 222565
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Post-Wade Decisions

Text: Subsequent decisions prompt us to question further the validity of Wade 's pronouncement that the Supreme Court of Virginia would not adopt a cross-jurisdictional equitable tolling rule. Two years after Wade, the Supreme Court of Virginia for the first time considered whether Virginia's tolling statute, Va.Code Ann. § 8.01-229(E)(1), was triggered by an action filed in a foreign jurisdiction, and concluded that the statute applies to actions filed in federal courts. Welding, Inc. v. Bland Cnty. Serv. Auth., 261 Va. 218, 541 S.E.2d 909, 912 (2001). Welding, a construction company, sued the Bland County Service Authority in federal court in West Virginia for payments allegedly due under a construction contract. The district court dismissed the action for lack of jurisdiction pursuant to a forum-selection clause in the contract. Id. at 911. Welding filed a new action in Virginia state court, and the state trial court dismissed Welding's action as untimely under Virginia's applicable six-month limitations period because filing it in a forum outside the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth prevented Weld from invoking Virginia's tolling statute. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). The Supreme Court of Virginia reversed. It explained that [t]here is no language in [Virginia's tolling statute] which limits or restricts its application to a specific type of action or precludes its applicability to actions filed in a federal court. Accordingly, we conclude that the trial court erred in construing Code § 8.01-229(E)(1) as inapplicable to actions filed in federal courts. Id. In Shimari v. CACI International, Inc., No. 1:08cv827, 2008 WL 7348184 (E.D.Va. Nov. 25, 2008), the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia addressed the issue presented here, namely, whether cross-jurisdictional tolling applies under Virginia law to the common-law tort claims of putative plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit filed in federal court in another jurisdiction where certification is later denied. Id. at . The district court in Shimari acknowledged that Wade declined the application of cross-jurisdictional tolling, predicting that Virginia would not adopt it. Id. But it asserted that Wade had wrongly predicted the evolution of Virginia law in view of Welding, which required the court to apply Virginia's equitable tolling rules whether jurisdiction is based on federal question or diversity. Id. at  (In Welding, the court expressly recognized cross-jurisdictional tolling in Virginia. As a result, the filing of the ... class action equitably tolled the statute of limitations....). More recently, in Torkie-Tork v. Wyeth, 739 F.Supp.2d 887 (E.D.Va.2010), the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia again concluded that Virginia law permitted cross-jurisdictional tolling in the context of class actions. The facts in these cases on appeal are similar to the facts in Torkie-Tork. There, Georgia Torkie-Tork, a Virginia citizen, sued a pharmaceutical manufacturer of a drug that allegedly injured her. She filed her complaint in Virginia state court on July 2, 2004, asserting claims of negligence, defective design, failure to warn, breach of express warranty, negligent misrepresentation, and fraud. 739 F.Supp.2d at 889. The action was first removed to the Eastern District of Virginia in August 2004, and then transferred to the Eastern District of Arkansas as part of a multi-district litigation. At the conclusion of the multi-district litigation, the case was transferred back to the Eastern District of Virginia, where the defendant moved for summary judgment on the ground that the action was untimely, among other things. Id. Torkie-Tork responded that a federal class action in the Northern District of Illinois encompassing class members who suffered injury after taking the same drug served to toll the Virginia limitations statute. Id. The district court in Torkie-Tork concluded that, in light of Welding, Wade 's pronouncement that the Supreme Court of Virginia would refuse to adopt cross-jurisdictional class action tolling was no longer good law. Id. at 892-93. The court agreed with the court in Shimari that Wade had misconstrued Virginia law and that Welding refutes Wade 's rationale and holding, even though it concerned statutory rather than equitable tolling. 739 F.Supp.2d at 893. Instead, it held that Virginia Code Ann. § 8.01-229(E)(1) operates to toll Virginia's statute of limitations for the time during which the plaintiff is a putative member of a federal class action suit in another jurisdiction. Id. at 894. The court reasoned that there is no coherent basis to distinguish the tolling statute's application to a standard federal civil suit  to which, after Welding, statutory tolling clearly applies  from its application to a federal class action suit. Id. Welding, Shimari, and Torkie-Tork give us reason to believe that Wade may not, in fact, be a correct statement of Virginia law. To be sure, there are important factual and procedural differences between Welding, Shimari, and Torkie-Tork on the one hand, and Wade on the other hand. For example, Welding did not involve a class action or implicate the policy interests discussed in Wade as reasons to reject cross-jurisdictional tolling in the class action context. And Torkie-Tork focused entirely on Virginia's tolling statute, id. at 892-95, without analyzing Virginia's equitable tolling doctrine. Nonetheless, these post- Wade decisions give us reason to conclude that the relevant question of state law necessary to resolve this appeal remains an open one. As previously noted, because certification is available in this case, and we believe that we lack sufficient indicia of Virginia state law, we can ask the Supreme Court of Virginia itself whether Wade accurately predicted Virginia law. We conclude that certification to the Supreme Court of Virginia is appropriate on these facts. In particular, we are satisfied that there is a lack of authoritative state court decisions on point, that the issue is one of considerable importance to the state, and that these issues arise with some frequency. Finally, we are confident that certification can and will resolve this litigation as the issues to be certified are determinative of this appeal. Va. Sup.Ct. R. 5:40(a).