Legal Docket: The question beneath every case

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Monday the 24th of November.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: And I’m Jenny Rough. Time now for Legal Docket. Today we consider three Supreme Court cases that turn on a deceptively simple question: Whether a court has the power to hear a case?

Take some absurd ideas just to illustrate the point: A traffic court, for example, has no authority to hear a case about a possible violation of the U.S. Copyright Act. Federal courts cannot hear cases about certain matters of family law. For the most part, that’s for the state courts.

That is the heart of what lawyers call jurisdiction.

EICHER: Before we get into the current cases, it may help to remember that questions like this have been with us from the very beginning of the American Republic.

Leading figures of the founding era argued over them.

It’s a shame we have no audio from these great debates.

ROUGH: Yeah, it is, but popular culture has re-created those debates. Take HBO’s John Adams miniseries for example.

There was this great moment in the series that captures a real disagreement between Adams and Thomas Jefferson about the nature of binding law and the role of a constitution. Maybe you remember this small scene, it begins with a pensive Jefferson.

JEFFERSON: I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to its laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.

EICHER: Adams was taken aback.

ADAMS: But surely the Constitution … is meant to establish the stability and the long term, ah, legality essential to the continuation of civilized society.

ROUGH: That made for great television, but this was not an idle philosophical conversation.

Jefferson and Adams famously clashed over the judiciary — President Adams’s last-minute judicial appointment of William Marbury before he left office, and Jefferson’s refusal to be bound by it — led directly to one of the most important Supreme Court cases in American history. One that every law student studies: Marbury versus Madison.

EICHER: And that case turned on the highly technical question of jurisdiction. The Supreme Court said it simply did not have the authority to hear Marbury’s claim. But that narrow ruling became the foundation for something enormous: the doctrine of judicial review, the Court’s power to strike down laws it finds unconstitutional.

ROUGH: So even though jurisdiction may sound dry or procedural, the stakes can be very high. Today, we have, as I said, three cases where everything turns on that kind of question.

Let’s start with a lawsuit about contaminated food, Hain Celestial versus Palmquist. It began in early 2021. Audio here from a CBS news program.

AUDIO: A disturbing new congressional report out later today finds more cases of manufacturers selling baby food with high levels of toxic heavy metals. The report describes dangerous levels of toxins including arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury in popular baby food products.

EICHER: For years, Sarah and Grant Palmquist fed their young son organic baby foods, specifically the brand Earth’s Best. Later on, he would develop autism. Tests would reveal heavy metals in his system. So the Palmquists sued Hain Celestial, that’s the foodmaker. They also sued Whole Foods, the retailer.

The parents live in Texas. And they wanted to pursue their case in state court. But Hain wanted the case in federal court.

ROUGH: Lawyers in this area know that state and federal courts can feel very different. Plaintiffs often prefer state courts for strategic reasons: more familiarity, local juries, looser rules of evidence.

Defendants often prefer federal courts because of features that are the opposite: jury pools that are broader, legal rules that are stricter.

That preference battle leads straight into what’s known in the law as diversity jurisdiction. Federal courts can hear cases between citizens of different states—but only if every defendant is from a different state than every plaintiff.

EICHER: Whole Foods is based in Austin, Texas. If Whole Foods stayed in the suit, the case stayed in court in Texas.

But a trial court dismissed Whole Foods as “ fraudulently joined” saying the parents added Whole Foods only to block removal to federal court.

With Whole Foods out, the trial happened in federal court, and Hain won.

ROUGH: The Palmquists appealed, and the appellate court said: Whole Foods was a proper defendant. So the case should’ve stayed in state court all along. It ordered a new trial — in state court.

EICHER: And now on appeal at the Supreme Court, Hain argued a new trial is unnecessary. The parents had their day in court, and they can still pursue a separate lawsuit against Whole Foods in Texas.

ROUGH: But Justice Sonia Sotomayor wasn’t sure that was the way to fix the mistake. Here she is in an exchange with the lawyer for Hain, Sarah Harrington:

SOTOMAYOR: This plaintiff wanted to be in state court. It sued two parties. Your client and Whole Foods.

SARAH HARRINGTON: Right.

SOTOMAYOR: All right? It wanted to litigate. It couldn’t because someone that it had the right to include, Whole Foods, was dismissed erroneously. … It was deprived permanently of its opportunity, tactical opportunity, to try this in state court. … It had a tactical advantage it was erroneously deprived of.

HARRINGTON: I don’t think that’s right, Justice Sotomayor. Being able to sue in state court isn’t a tactical advantage.

SOTOMAYOR: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we wouldn’t have all the removal arguments that we encounter if it wasn’t.

ROUGH: Hain’s attorney argued it would be a waste of resources to have another trial. But that didn’t sit well with Justice Neil Gorsuch.

GORSUCH: What do we do about the fact that the problem here was created by your client through an improper removal? I mean, in terms of fairness, you know, your hands aren’t exactly clean here.

EICHER: On the other hand, perhaps the plaintiffs acted unfairly, too. They could have moved sooner in the process to appeal the trial court’s decision to dismiss Whole Foods. They chose not to. Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

BARRETT: That makes it seem like your choice was to take a wait-and-see approach and then decide whether you liked the result or not before you chose to fight it.

ROUGH: But Hain’s attorney emphasized that plaintiffs lost on the merits of their food contamination case. They failed to prove the toxic substances caused their son’s condition. So a do-over wouldn’t matter.

But Justice Elena Kagan pushed back to remind Hain how litigation is designed to work.

KAGAN: From the plaintiff’s point of view, the thing that went wrong is that the plaintiff is the master of her complaint. She clearly structured a suit in order to bring it in state court. That was why she joined these two parties perfectly legitimately in order to have the suit in state court, rather than in federal court where it was. And the effect of this district court misjudgment was not that two parties were separated. It’s that the suit was tried in the wrong place from the plaintiff’s point of view. And the plaintiff's point of view is the thing that should matter because the plaintiff is the master of her complaint.

So that’s “diversity jurisdiction,” our next case, quickly, has to do with personal jurisdiction—the court’s power to make a legally binding decision about the person being sued.

EICHER: Vista Pro Automotive filed for bankruptcy. And went after Coney Island Auto Parts for unpaid invoices. But Vista Pro incorrectly addressed the complaint, and Coney Island never responded. Eventually, a bankruptcy court entered a default judgment against Coney Island and ordered the company to pay about $50,000 in outstanding debt.

ROUGH: For purposes of this case, assume two points:

One: The bankruptcy court lacked personal jurisdiction to enter the judgment because service was improper. Meaning, Coney Island did not receive the right kind of notice that it was being sued.

Point two: A judgment entered without personal jurisdiction is considered void.

Those are not the disputes. The dispute is whether there’s a time limit for asking a court to set aside a void judgment.

EICHER: Vista Pro says yes, there is: a federal rule requires challenges to come within a reasonable time.

Coney Island says no, there isn’t: you can’t put a time limit on something that was void from the get-go.

ROUGH: Justice Samuel Alito asked how others have handled this conundrum. You’ll hear him use the term “void ab initio” … that just means void from the beginning.

ALITO: What have the courts of appeals and the commentators … said about this question and whether there’s a reasonable time limitation on seeking relief from a judgment that’s void ab initio?

Most others favor Coney Island. This case arose in the Sixth Circuit, and it’s the only one that imposes a time limit. So this decision will resolve the split among the federal appeals courts.

Finally, a case on appellate jurisdiction. Most of the time, an appeals court can only hear an appeal after the case is finished.

EICHER: But most of the time is not all of the time. There are times when a party can appeal a decision to a higher court while the case is still in progress.

In this last case, Alejandro Menocal was detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Colorado run by a government contractor known as GEO Group. He and others claim GEO forced them to work in violation of federal law.

ROUGH: GEO argued it was simply following ICE orders. Because it was acting in the government’s place, it argued it should receive the same immunity the government gets. The trial court denied that claim. GEO tried an immediate appeal, but the appellate court said it lacked jurisdiction to hear the challenge while the litigation was in progress.

EICHER: Justice Alito said that if it were the government bringing the case, it could get an early appeal. So why should the contractor be treated differently?

ALITO: Well, when GEO is doing exactly what government officials can do and generally have done — running facilities like this. So imagine you had brought these claims against ICE and specific ICE officials. ICE and the officials could raise sovereign immunity, they could raise qualified immunity and Westfall Act immunity, and if the district court denied any of those, then they could get an interlocutory appeal. So why shouldn't the rule be the same?

ROUGH: If GEO is immune, the case would not move forward. But Alejandro Menocal and the other detainees argue GEO is only entitled to bring its argument as a defense during trial.

Interestingly, the Trump administration supports the detainees’ legal position here.

To return to the place we started, from the days of Marbury versus Madison until now, the law around jurisdiction has evolved. And these current cases get into the weeds of it. But if you listen carefully enough you’ll hear the echoes of those original arguments between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams continuing on.

JEFFERSON: You have a disconcerting lack of faith in your fellow man. Mr. A, and in yourself, if I may say.

ADAMS: Yes, and you display a dangerous excess of faith in your fellow man. Mr. Jefferson.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.