Court Opinion

ID: 9486653
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:55:03.20239+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:50.899729
License: Public Domain

RIPPLE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I doubt that few, if any, cases that have been decided during recent years have consumed the number of judge-hours that this case has cost this court. After full consideration by a panel of judges, full en banc consideration by the entire court, an attempt at certification, and the drafting and full consideration of a second en banc opinion, we remain divided on the content of Illinois law as well as the appropriate application of that law to the facts of this case. Today’s decision resolves the litigation before us, but the bench and bar are provided with a decision that, as a practical matter, does nothing to clarify the law and therefore expedite the course of later litigation. Indeed, all that is decided is that an ordinary disposable cigarette lighter is such an obviously dangerous product that, when district courts of this circuit are confronted with such a case again, they ought not apply the risk utility test. I assume that the court’s decision implicitly permits a different result even in that case if, in the interim, the courts of Illinois indicate that they would reach the contrary result. This minimal yield from such a significant effort on the part of so many judges ought to induce a great deal of reflection and a careful self-examination of our use of en banc procedures.1
*1416Courts of appeals have wide latitude in determining whether to hear a case en banc. The Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure provide some, but minimal, assistance in this regard. Rule 35(a) provides in pertinent part:
(a) When Hearing or Rehearing In Banc Will be Ordered. A majority of the circuit judges who are in regular active service may order that an appeal or other proceeding be heard or reheard by the court of appeals in banc. Such a hearing or rehearing is not favored and ordinarily will not be ordered except (1) when consideration by the full Court is necessary to secure or maintain uniformity of its decisions, or (2) when the proceeding involves a question of exceptional importance.
When the court decides to devote its time to hearing a case en banc, it is determining that such a significant investment of time and energy is necessary to accomplish legitimate jurisprudential goals beyond decision in the individual case. Such “legitimate jurisprudential goals” include, as our rules note, the resolution of conflicts between this circuit and other courts of appeals. It also includes the resolution of novel and important issues of federal law and recurring procedural issues of enduring importance to the administration of justice in the federal courts. On the other hand, few would maintain that “legitimate jurisprudential goals” include forsaking the normal course of common law adjudication in order to impose ideological discipline on fellow federal judges. Nor do such legitimate goals include attempting to set the vectors for the future course of state law development, a prerogative left by the Constitution to the state courts.
The adjudication of diversity eases affords little opportunity for the accomplishment of the legitimate goals of an en banc proceeding. Indeed, beyond rendering a decision in the particular case at hand, little of enduring value can be accomplished by hearing a diversity case en banc. In any diversity case, this court’s decision has no precedential effect on the state courts. Diginet, Inc. v. Western Union ATS, Inc., 958 F.2d 1388, 1395 (7th Cir.1992) (“State courts are not bound by federal courts’ interpretations of state law.”); Cohn v. Checker Motors Corp., 233 Ill.App.3d 839, 175 Ill.Dec. 98, 103, 599 N.E.2d 1112, 1117 (1992) (stating that Illinois courts have no obligation to follow decisions of federal courts interpreting state law). While the decision is binding on the federal trial courts — at least as long as the decision’s underpinnings are left intact by subsequent state court activity — it is rarely possible, given the difficulty2 in making “Erie Guesses,”3 to provide, in any principled fashion, a great deal of meaningful guidance for the resolution of future cases. Moreover, federal court *1417pronouncements on the content of state law inherently involve a significant intrusion on the prerogative of the state courts to control that development. As Chief Judge Jon Newman of the Second Circuit has pointed out, federal court pronouncements on state law in the exercise of its responsibilities under the Erie doctrine have the potential of disrupting the normal pattern of development of state law. “One distinct shortcoming of diversity jurisdiction is the interruption of the orderly development and authoritative exposition of state law occasioned by sporadic, federal court adjudications.” Factors Etc., Inc. v. Pro Arts Inc., 652 F.2d 278, 282 (2d Cir.1981), cert. denied, 456 U.S. 927, 102 S.Ct. 1973, 72 L.Ed.2d 442 (1982). When the federal court’s “Erie Guess” is wrong, the resulting impact on state law developments is, of course, especially significant. As Chief Judge Sloviter has written:
Until corrected by the state supreme court, such incorrect predictions inevitably skew the decisions of persons and businesses who rely on them and inequitably affect the losing federal litigant who cannot appeal the decision to the state’s supreme court; they may even mislead lower state courts that may be inclined to accept federal predictions as applicable precedent.
Dolores K. Sloviter, A Federal Judge Views Diversity Jurisdiction through the Lens of Federalism, 78 Va.L.Rev. 1671, 1681 (1992).
All of these limitations and dangers in the adjudication of diversity eases are magnified when the court decides to hear such a matter en bane. As noted earlier, by their nature, en banc proceedings are intended to decide more than the case before the court and to marshall the intellectual and moral authority of the entire court on the issue presented. Yet, these goals are, in the context of the diversity case, frustrated ab initio. Whatever the court’s decision, it can have no binding authority on the state courts and, in future cases, lower federal courts must still take into consideration subsequent state caselaw developments. An erroneous decision by the en bane court — or its gratuitous comment on what state law ought to be — is a particularly unwarranted intrusion into the prerogative of the state to control the development of its own law.
These considerations counsel that en banc adjudication in diversity cases ought to be undertaken only in the most unusual circumstances. The circumstances surrounding this litigation certainly make the exercise of our en banc authority questionable. We have labored greatly and produced a decision that does little, if anything, to promote a legitimate goal of an en banc proceeding. The result is no doubt pleasing, from an ideological point of view, to the majority of the court and it can now impose that ideological position, at least temporarily, on the district courts. Yet, whether the majority has interpreted properly Illinois law remains, at best, a rather weak “Erie Guess.” The imprudence of the course chosen by the court is, in my view, particularly underlined by the fact that it appears that BIC’s concession in the district court that the child was a foreseeable user creates a genuine issue of triable fact with respect to the consumer contemplation test. See Doser v. Savage Mfg. & Sales, Inc., 142 Ill.2d 176, 154 Ill.Dec. 593, 603, 568 N.E.2d 814, 824 (1990).4 The court’s expounding on the risk utility test is therefore unnecessary and a significant intrusion into the prerogatives of the state. Accordingly, I would vacate the order granting rehearing en banc as having been improvidently entered.

. The majority opinion takes the rather unconventional step of disclosing the vote of the court on the petition for rehearing en banc in order to suggest that there is an inconsistency in the position that I have taken in the disposition of this appeal. My position has changed in the course of this appeal. Indeed, that is the whole point of this separate opinion. As I have noted in the text, the difficulties the court has experienced in deciding this matter have convinced me that the course upon which we originally embarked is not a prudent one and that we ought to accept that reality and vacate the en banc order as having been improvidently entered. It is for this reason that, in urging my colleagues to adopt the path I have suggested here, I have employed the first person plural.
Accordingly, it is not accurate for the majority to say simply that I am critical of the decision to take the case en banc; I am critical of the decision to continue to expend judicial resources on the matter when it has become clear that such a course will accomplish so very little and sanction a judicial methodology that has a very undesirable impact on the ability of the states to control the development of their law and on the accuracy of the law that we establish as precedent for the district courts of this circuit.

. Chief Judge Sloviter of the Third Circuit has recently described succinctly this difficulty:
Finding the applicable state law, however, is a search that often proves elusive. Difficulty arises when the federal courts must predict how the highest court of the state would decide the issue. Even when there is a state supreme court decision on point, the direction is not always crystal clear. For example, the allegedly controlling decision of the state supreme court may be old and intervening doctrinal trends may call into question whether the state supreme court would follow it today. Further, the relevant language in the state supreme court’s decision may be merely dictum, or the pertinent holding may have been joined by less than a majority of that court.
More significant difficulties arise when the state supreme court has not directly addressed an issue. As the late Judge Henry Friendly noted, "[wjhereas the highest court of the state can 'quite acceptably ride along a crest of common sense, avoiding the extensive citation of authority,’ a federal court oftén must exhaustively dissect each piece of evidence thought to cast light on what the highest state court would ultimately decide.” What weight should a federal court give decisions of intermediate state courts? Of what consequence are inconsistencies in the state court decisions? What if there is "persuasive data” that the state supreme court would decide differently than the intermediate court?
Finally, the most difficult problems arise when there are not state court decisions on point. The court on which I sit has said that when we must predict state law in such situations, we should turn to "analogous decisions, considered dicta, scholarly works, and any other reliable data tending convincingly to show how the highest court in the state would decide the issue.”
Dolores K. Sloviter, A Federal Judge Views Diversity Jurisdiction through the Lens of Federalism, 78 Va.L.Rev. 1671, 1675-77 (1992) (citations and footnotes omitted).

. Id. at 1679.

. As noted in my separate opinion in the court’s first effort in this case, in the absence of any further guidance from the Supreme Court of Illinois, we are obliged to follow its latest pronouncement. See Todd v. Societe BIC, S.A., 9 F.3d 1216, 1224 (7th Cir.1993) (Ripple, J., concurring). As set forth in more detail in my earlier opinion, Doser makes it clear that foreseeability is an element in determining whether a product is unreasonably dangerous. Id.