Opinion ID: 1819871
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 11

Heading: Law-of-the-Case Class Certification

Text: I have previously stated why the law-of-the-case doctrine should not apply to the Third District's 2003 review of this case, which followed the Phase I and Phase II jury trials and judgments. Florida Department of Transportation v. Juliano, 801 So.2d 101 (Fla.2001), should not be applied in this class action. Moreover, since the majority ends up decertifying the class, I fail to understand the point of the majority's discussion of this issue. Majority op. at 1265-67. The Third District in its 2003 opinion correctly explains why the law-of-the-case doctrine does not apply. Liggett Group, Inc. v. Engle, 853 So.2d 434, 443 n. 4 (Fla. 3d DCA 2003). Furthermore, as the majority states, Of course, this Court is not bound by the Third District's law of the case. Majority op. at 1267. In the present case, the trial plan was not decided by the trial court until after the 1996 interlocutory appeal. The defendants objected to the trial plan and moved to decertify the class. The trial court denied the motion, although it expressed reservations about the manageability of the case and predicted that the necessary individual hearings will place a serious demand upon Florida's judicial resources. The denial of the defendant's motion to decertify was then appealed to the Third District. The Third District dismissed the appeal for lack of jurisdiction but expressly stated that the defendants had a right to obtain review of the propriety of the order by plenary appeal from any adverse judgment. Engle, 853 So.2d at 443. But now the majority in this Court makes the trial plan unreviewable in the district court by applying the law of the case to the earlier certification. Certainly, the trial plan should have been reviewable by the district court as part of a review of the motion to decertify after the trial plan was ordered. [18] It was the trial plan which demonstrated just how unworkable this class action was and why the class should have been decertified. It was the trial plan which resulted in the errors upon which the majority in this Court reverses the trial court's final judgment. It was the trial plan which resulted in the Phase I jury deciding whether the defendants were negligent, breached warranties, were strictly liable, or were guilty of fraud and misrepresentation, but Phase II decided the claimant's comparative fault. Such a bifurcation of issues violates article I, section 22 of the Florida Constitution, just as the Fifth Circuit in Castano v. American Tobacco Co., 84 F.3d 734 (5th Cir.1996), found that such a bifurcation of issues violated the Seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Castano court explained why a bifurcation of the comparative negligence issue from the defendant's negligence issue with a trial by separate juries is a violation of the Seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution: Another factor weighing heavily in favor of individual trials is the risk that in order to make this class action manageable, the court will be forced to bifurcate issues in violation of the Seventh Amendment. This class action is permeated with individual issues, such as proximate causation, comparative negligence, reliance, and compensatory damages. In order to manage so many individual issues, the district court proposed to empanel a class jury to adjudicate common issues. A second jury, or a number of second juries, will pass on the individual issues, either on a case-by-case basis or through group trials of individual plaintiffs. The Seventh Amendment entitles parties to have fact issues decided by one jury, and prohibits a second jury from reexamining those facts and issues. [n. 30] Thus, Constitution allows bifurcation of issues that are so separable that the second jury will not be called upon to reconsider findings of fact by the first: [T]his Court has cautioned that separation of issues is not the usual course that should be followed, and that the issue to be tried must be so distinct and separable from the others that a trial of it alone may be had without injustice. This limitation on the use of bifurcation is a recognition of the fact that inherent in the Seventh Amendment guarantee of a trial by jury is the general right of a litigant to have only one jury pass on a common issue of fact. The Supreme Court recognized this principle in Gasoline Products [Co., Inc. v. Champlin Refining Co., 283 U.S. 494, 51 S.Ct. 513, 75 L.Ed. 1188 (1931)]. . . . The Court explained . . . that a partial new trial may not be properly resorted to unless it clearly appears that the issue to be retried is so distinct and separable from the others that a trial of it alone may be had without injustice. Such a rule is dictated for the very practical reason that if separate juries are allowed to pass on issues involving overlapping legal and factual questions the verdicts rendered by each jury could be inconsistent. Alabama v. Blue Bird Body Co., 573 F.2d 309, 318 (5th Cir.1978) (citations and footnotes omitted). [n. 30] [N]o fact tried by jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States . . . U.S. Const. amend VII. The Seventh Circuit recently addressed Seventh Amendment limitations to bifurcation. In [ In re] Rhone-Poulenc [Rorer, Inc.], 51 F.3d [1293] at 1302-03, Chief Judge Posner described the constitutional limitation as one requiring a court to carve at the joint in such a way so that the same issue is not reexamined by different juries. The right to a jury trial . . . is a right have juriable issues determined by the first jury impaneled to hear them (provided there are no errors warranting a new trial), and not reexamined by another finder of fact. Id. at 1303. Severing a defendant's conduct from comparative negligence results in the type of risk that our court forbade in Blue Bird. Comparative negligence, by definition, requires a comparison between the defendant's and the plaintiff's conduct. Rhone-Poulenc, 51 F.3d at 1303 (Comparative negligence entails, as the name implies, a comparison of the degree of negligence of plaintiff and defendant.) At a bare minimum, a second jury will rehear evidence of the defendant's conduct. There is a risk that in apportioning fault, the second jury could reevaluate the defendant's fault, determine that the defendant was not at fault, and apportion 100% of the fault to the plaintiff. In such a situation, the second jury would be impermissibly reconsidering the findings of a first jury. The risk of such reevaluation is so great that class treatment can hardly be said to be superior to individual adjudication. 84 F.3d at 750-51. Every smoker's case has a substantial comparative fault defense. The majority's opinion approves one jury making the decision on the defendant's negligence and a different jury making a decision on the plaintiff's negligence and comparing the two. The second jury will be required to accept the first jury's findings as to the defendant's negligence and then in some way compare the defendant's negligence with the second jury's finding as to the plaintiff's negligence. It is only logical that comparative negligence, which the second jury will be finding, is an evaluation of how the negligence of the two parties relate. That can only be accomplished by weighing the evidence of each party's negligence as a cause of the defendant's negligence, which the majority's bifurcation of negligence and comparative negligence prevents from occurring on the basis of one jury's findings. Similarly, there is no logical way to decide the issues of misrepresentation and the element within misrepresentation of reliance by separate juries without having the second jury required to accept the findings of the first jury. Both constitutionally and practically, these are issues which should be decided by one fact-finder so that there is consistency in the resolution of the facts. The majority states that it will follow the Fifth Circuit's two-to-one majority opinion in Mullen v. Treasure Chest Casino, LLC, 186 F.3d 620, 628-29 (5th Cir. 1999), rather than the Fifth Circuit's decision in Castano. I cannot agree. Mullen was not a smoker's case. Mullen was a case brought under the federal Jones Act, [19] in which the claims by the individuals were from the same defective ventilation system in a floating casino that occurred over the same general period of time. The Mullen majority pointed out that these were important distinguishing facts from Castano and from the asbestos case decided by the Supreme Court in Amchem Products, Inc. Moreoverand very significantlythe Mullen majority specifically pointed out that as in Treasure Chest, the defendant in the Mullen case did not raise in the trial court the Seventh Amendment issue of having one jury consider the defendant's conduct and another consider the plaintiffs' comparative negligence. I find the dissent in Mullen, which adheres to Castano and In re Rhone-Poulenc Rorer, Inc., 51 F.3d 1293, 1302-03 (7th Cir.1995), to be the view which is correct for smokers' cases in Florida. Finally, the majority opinion decides that the cut-off date for class membership should be November 21, 1996. Majority op. at 1274. This was, of course, after the Third District decision in the interlocutory appeal, which was issued on January 31, 1996. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. v. Engle, 672 So.2d 39 (Fla. 3d DCA 1996). It is wholly inconsistent for the majority to apply the law of the 1996 case to prevent the Third District's 2003 review of the certification and to also hold that the cut-off date for the class was after the 1996 review. This results in the actual order of certification being unreviewable in the district court.