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Eleventh Circuit Holds That CAFA Cases Require At Least One Plaintiff with $75K+ Claim

Per Cappuccitti v. DirecTV, Inc., --- F.3d ----, 2010 WL 2803093 (11th Cir. July 19, 2010)

We hold that in a CAFA action originally filed in federal court, at least one of the plaintiffs must allege an amount in controversy that satisfies the current congressional requirement for diversity jurisdiction provided in 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a). Such a conclusion is compelled by the language of § 1332 as well as the general principle that federal courts are tribunals of limited jurisdiction whose power to hear cases must be authorized by the Constitution and by Congress. See, e.g., Kokkonen v. Guardian Life Ins. Co. of Am., 511 U.S. 375, 377, 114 S.Ct. 1673, 1675, 128 L.Ed.2d 391 (1994). If we held that § 1332(a)'s $75,000 requirement for an individual defendant did not apply to § 1332(d)(2) cases, we would be expanding federal court jurisdiction beyond Congress's authorization. We would essentially transform federal courts hearing originally-filed CAFA cases into small claims courts, where plaintiffs could bring five-dollar claims by alleging gargantuan class sizes to meet the $5,000,000 aggregate amount requirement. While Congress intended to expand federal jurisdiction over class actions when it enacted CAFA, surely this could not have been the result it intended.

Nor does it require analytical acrobatics to apply § 1332(a)'s jurisdictional requirement in the CAFA class action context. While § 1332(d) may have altered § 1332(a) to require only minimal diversity in CAFA actions, Lowery, 483 F.3d at 1193 n. 24, there is no evidence of congressional intent in § 1332(d) to obviate § 1332(a)'s $75,000 requirement as to at least one plaintiff.FN11 Moreover, the $75,000 requirement expressly applies in actions removed under CAFA, 28 U.S.C. § 1332(d)(11)(B)(i),FN12 and we can think of no reason why Congress would have intended the requirement in the context of CAFA removal jurisdiction but not CAFA original jurisdiction. Holding otherwise would cause a nonsensical result: a case in which a plaintiff claimed less than $75,000 in controversy in state court could not enter federal court by removal (defeating Congress's purposes in enacting CAFA), but could, if the plaintiff chose, be brought in federal court under CAFA original jurisdiction (assuming the case met all of CAFA's other requirements). Again, we highly doubt that Congress intended this result.

Full post as published by Federal Civil Practice Bulletin on July 21, 2010 (boomark / email).