Civ
Pro 2 Notes
No
class Friday September 24th, and no class
Wednesday October 13th.
More on Owen Equipment & Erection Co. v. Kroger
We
have jurisdictional problems! A plaintiff
may assert any claim against a third-party defendant that arises under the same
transaction or occurrence. After summary
judgment, the power company has dropped out, and all that’s left is the claim
against Owen. But there is testimony
that Owen actually has its principal place of business in
What
should the court do in this situation? On
the one hand, the federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction. If the court doesn’t have subject matter
jurisdiction over the case, theoretically the court has no power over the defendant. It’s all a matter of whether the court will
give substance to that rule of law or try to ease out of it. The Supreme Court views it as a diversity
issue. But recall the source of diversity
jurisdiction: Article III gives the federal courts power to try cases “between
citizens of different States”. It doesn’t
say anything about complete diversity. Statutory
jurisdiction comes from 28 U.S.C. § 1332, which has the same language. But decisions like Strawbridge give us the rule of complete
diversity, where we interpret the statute to mean that you can’t have a party
on one side who is from the same state as the other. Justice Stewart says that this is different
from the Rule 14 issue in that here we have a non-federal claim asserted by the
plaintiff that could have all been brought in state court. When you use impleader, you may not have
other options because you weren’t the master of the complaint.
All
of this answer that we get from Owen v.
Kroger is later codified by the supplemental jurisdiction statute: 28
U.S.C. § 1367. It’s difficult. The general rule is that there is supplemental jurisdiction over claims
and parties that are part of the same case or controversy in a constitutional
sense. This includes joinder of
additional parties. That’s an efficiency
rule. What makes the statute difficult
is that this is the general grant of power that is then restricted as to
certain types of claims brought in certain types of ways. Subsection (b) takes away certain types of jurisdiction. You can’t get supplemental jurisdiction when jurisdiction
is based only on 28 U.S.C. § 1332 (diversity jurisdiction) and when you’re
trying to join up people (in certain ways, like Rule 14, 19, 20, and 24) who
would destroy complete diversity. So (a)
says that you have supplemental jurisdiction over claims and parties, but (b)
says that if you don’t have diversity, you don’t have supplemental jurisdiction,
as long as you’re within certain categories.
So
the intent of Congress was to codify the result of Owen v. Kroger. How did they
do? In Owen, all the claims arise from the same case or controversy. We could have three different cases if we
wanted to, but it’s more efficient to put them all together. What about OPPD’s
claim against Owen? The statute
generally says that we’ll grant jurisdiction for anything that comes from the
same case or controversy, but it’s a
diversity case, and you don’t have supplemental jurisdiction over claims made
by plaintiffs against third parties. But
this is a claim by a defendant, so there’s no problem! What if Kroger had a federal question claim
she could raise against Owen, like a federal statute about the operation of
cranes? Could she bring that claim? § 1367 says this isn’t based solely on §
1332, so it’s good!
What
if Owen sues Kroger for vandalizing the crane?
The defendant can certainly plead that claim, and § 1367(b) wouldn’t get
in the way because it’s not the plaintiff’s
claim. It’s a claim by a third-party defendant
against a plaintiff, which doesn’t fall into any of the § 1367(b) excluded
categories. Therefore, it must be
okay! If that’s okay, can Kroger then
bring the wrongful death claim? Is it a
compulsory counterclaim? Check out the statute. Yeazell says that Kroger is now acting as a defendant,
but Fairman says that the statute doesn’t allow this. Kroger is still a plaintiff! It looks like the wrongful death claim is
still a claim made by a plaintiff against a person made a party under Rule
14. This is one of the big problems of
the statute: plaintiffs’ defensive claims barred by § 1367(b). It doesn’t make any sense for them to be
precluded, because the plaintiff was acting as if it were a defendant.
Say
we have a plaintiff from
The Rule of Zahn
This
rule says that in a diversity class action, every member of the class must
exceed the amount in controversy ($75,000+).
It will be hard to put together diversity class action unless they’re major mass torts. The problem is that the statute doesn’t say
anything about Rule 23. The way it’s
constructed, you would only need one person to meet the $75,000 requirement,
and then you could just bring in everyone else as supplemental. The legislative history of the statute
actually says that they want to preserve the rule of Zahn. But the statute doesn’t say this! The Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh
Circuits have said Zahn is no longer good law after §
1367. The First, Third, Eighth and Tenth
Circuits say Zahn
is still good. The Sixth Circuit sided
with the Circuits that say it’s not
good law. Fairman blames the sloppy
statute drafters!