Aaron Buckley Writes Bender’s California Labor & Employment Bulletin Article About Ninth Circuit Clarification on CAFA Removal

Aaron Buckley, national vice chair of the Quarles & Brady Labor & Employment Practice Group, wrote an article for Bender’s California Labor & Employment Bulletin about the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals clarification on moving a class action case from state to federal court under the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA). Buckley uses a specific court case to further explain this decision.

An excerpt:

When a CAFA defendant removes a class action to federal court, the notice of removal “need include only a plausible allegation that the amount in controversy exceeds the jurisdictional threshold.”³ Evidence establishing the amount is required…only when the plaintiff contests, or the court questions, the defendant’s allegation.”⁴ If the allegation is disputed, the removing party bears the burden of demonstrating by a preponderance of the evidence that the amount in controversy exceeds $5 million.⁵

^…

The district court remanded the case to state court, explaining that Rose Hills had failed “to produce evidence supporting its amount-in controversy requirement.”²⁴ The district court criticized Rose Hills’ assumptions, saying its approach “amount[ed] to little more than plucking a violation rate out of thin air and calling it ‘reasonable,’” and concluding there was no basis for suggesting the violation rate assumed by Rose Hills “is any more or less reasonable” than a violation rate of one-half or one-quarter that rate.²⁵

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