Individual plaintiffs prevail in landmark U.S. Supreme Court case interpreting supplemental jurisdiction statute

Client(s) Ortega, Maria del Rosario, Sergio Blanco, Beatriz Blanco-Ortega, and Patrizia Blanco-Ortega

Jones Day represented individual plaintiffs in this personal injury action raising the jurisdictional question whether the requirement that every plaintiff in a diversity case must separately satisfy the jurisdictional amount-in-controversy requirement survives the enactment of the supplemental jurisdiction statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1367. The First Circuit held that the claims of one of the plaintiffs in this case, who are joined under Rule 20 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, met the jurisdictional minimum, but that the remaining plaintiffs failed individually to meet that threshold. The First Circuit also ruled that the remaining plaintiffs' claims could not be brought into the case under the supplemental jurisdiction statute. The Supreme Court reversed, holding that Section 1367 abrogates the requirement that each Rule 20 plaintiff must separately satisfy the jurisdictional minimum. Don Ayer presented oral argument in this case in February 2005.

Ortega v. Star-Kist Foods, Inc., 545 U.S. 546 (2005)