Opinion ID: 77297
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Affirmative Defenses

Text: 70 The remaining sanction raises the same kind of problem. GM argues that the district court violated due process because there is absolutely no nexus between the documents that the district court ordered produced in its discovery orders and the court's sanction striking GM's affirmative defenses of res judicata, issue preclusion, judicial estoppel, or law of the case doctrine. We agree. 71 In Insurance Corp. of Ireland, the Supreme Court addressed whether the district court violated due process when the court overruled an objection to personal jurisdiction as a sanction for the failure by the defendants to provide documents regarding personal jurisdiction, as required by a discovery order. Id. at 695, 102 S.Ct. at 2101. The Supreme Court upheld the sanction and explained that because of the failure of the defendants to provide discovery, the plaintiff was unable to determine the extent of contacts between the defendants and the forum state. Id. at 709, 102 S.Ct. at 2107. The Court concluded that the sanction was specifically related to the discovery abuse, because the imposition of the sanction took as established the facts . . . that [the plaintiff] was seeking to establish through discovery. Id. at 709, 102 S.Ct. at 2107-08. 72 Here, the district court struck three defenses regarding the preclusive effect of the earlier litigation in the state courts, but those defenses had no apparent relationship with the discovery abuse. The discovery orders compelled the production of documents regarding satellite agreements between GM and Chevrolet dealers nationwide and vehicle allocation data for Chevrolet dealers in the Birmingham area, but those documents were unrelated to the earlier litigation in the state courts. As with the monetary sanctions, the district court failed to state any reasons for striking these defenses. Because the legal defenses were not specifically related to the particular `claim' which was at issue in the order to provide discovery, id. at 707, 102 S.Ct. at 2107, the sanctions violated the due process rights of GM.