Over the past decade, there has been a growing concern that plaintiffs’ lawyers increasingly filed large, national class actions in certain state court venues perceived to be very favorable to plaintiffs. These locations including Madison County, Illinois; Jefferson County, Texas; and Palm Beach County, Florida have been called everything from “magnet” jurisdictions to “magic” jurisdictions. Despite the fact that these class actions often involved plaintiffs from every state in the nation, and thus had a federal character, they could not be removed to federal court because of the “complete diversity” requirement. That is, every plaintiff had to be diverse from every defendant for federal jurisdiction to exist. A plaintiff ‘s lawyer seeking to avoid federal jurisdiction could simply add a non-diverse plaintiff or one defendant from the forum state who could be dismissed from the case once the removal period lapsed. The recently enacted Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 aims to end such forum shopping and ensure that class actions of a national scope are litigated in federal court.
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Reprinted with the permission of the Connecticut Lawyer. Connecticut Lawyer April 2005 and reprinted in the Arkansas Lawyer, Winter 2006