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Commentary: Supreme Court Issues Another Blow to Forum Shopping for Plaintiffs Bar

Submitted by jhartgen@abi.org on

The Supreme Court made clear that forum shopping has limits and the plaintiffs bar has gone too far, according to a Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. The Justices ruled 8-1 that out of state plaintiffs could not sue in Montana when the railroad company in question, BNSF, wasn’t incorporated there, the plaintiffs didn’t live there and the injuries didn’t occur there. That BNSF does business in Montana wasn’t adequate grounds for the company to be sued there. (BNSF v. Tyrell). “Our precedent,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority, “explains that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause does not permit a State to hale an out-of-state corporation before its courts when the corporation is not ‘at home’ in the State and the episode-in-suit occurred elsewhere.” The ruling overturned the Montana Supreme Court.