Antonio Abrego Abrego v. The Dow Chemical Co Shell Oil Company, D/B/A Shell Chemical Company, and Shell Agricultural Chemical Company

The recently enacted Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (“CAFA”), Pub.L. No. 109-2, 119 Stat. 4, alters the landscape for federal court jurisdiction over class actions. In addition to traditional class actions, CAFA covers certain other cases involving large numbers of plaintiffs, denominated “mass actions.” Dow Chemical Company (“Dow”) brings this interlocutory appeal, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1453 (c)(1), from the district court’s order remanding this purported “mass action.”

Dow maintains that under CAFA and contrary to preexisting removal jurisdiction law: (1) plaintiffs bear the burden of refuting the district court’s removal jurisdiction; (2) a “mass action” is removable regardless of whether there is jurisdiction over all plaintiffs whose claims are necessary to qualify the action as a mass action; and (3) the district court must allow jurisdictional discovery to determine the amount in controversy. The disputes between the parties on these discrete issues reflect a larger disagreement over whether the changes wrought by CAFA generally are limited to those enunciated in CAFA’s text, or whether courts should infer a broader transformation of jurisdictional principles than the…