Court Opinion

ID: 9474907
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:12:23.952302+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:24.271075
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I join in the opinion and judgment of the court, but I wish to explain my position at some further length.
This action by a Florida resident against a foreign (California) corporation, is founded wholly on state law and is in the federal courts wholly because of diversity of citizenship, 28 U.S.C. § 1332. It was not removed, it was originally filed in the United States District Court. In light of Judge Henderson’s clear analysis, it is apparent that plaintiff-appellant’s hopes of success now are, and must always have been, dependent on finding some court willing to take it on itself to alter the common law of Florida, as previously stated in judicial opinions. It is true that in recent years the old idea that common law courts are bound by their own precedents is sadly eroded. The modern or with-it view is that any doctrine originally established by courts can be modified or repealed by courts. I have no reason to think the Supreme Court of Florida does not share in this almost universal American position.
The duty of federal courts deciding common law cases under diversity would seem to be, if changes in state law are to be made, to leave it to the state courts (or, of course, legislature), to make them. To take the lead would be contrary to the teaching of Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, appropriately cited and followed in the majority opinion, and indeed would be an outrageous imposition on the right of the people of Florida to make their own laws and interpret or enforce them through institutions of their own creation.
In face of these self-evident facts, one wonders why this suit was brought in a federal and not in a state court, when either would have been permissible. True, Jennings might have removed a state court case. Plaintiff, however, might then, with some dignity, have requested that the federal court certify the question of state law to the state court for an answer. Having, herself, elected the wrong court from the point of view of receptiveness to proposals to change the common law, it is without any dignity at all that plaintiff now moves to have the case certified. Instead of forum shopping, this is forum hopping. I suppose plaintiff must have calculated some benefit to herself in approaching the *1535Florida Supreme Court indirectly instead of directly. There is no benefit, but detriment to the public and to the judicial system, in prolonging and complicating the route of this rather open-and-shut litigation through multiple courts.
Whatever the strategy is, it apparently had its counterpart in Illinois. I find the discussion by Judge Pell in Martin v. Harrington and Richardson, 743 F.2d 1200 (7th Cir.1984) very much in point. There, too, a request for certification was denied, the court, as we do, treating a decision of an intermediate appellate court of the state as sufficient to establish what the state law is. I share also Judge Cudahy’s concurring views about how future tort law might develop, but agree with him that our analysis must end with what the state law is now.