Toles v. Mead Johnson & Co. is one of thousands of product liability suits involving lifesaving nutritional products that the nation’s neonatal intensive care units rely upon to care for preterm infants. The core allegation in these suits—despite federal agencies’ scientific and medical consensus to the contrary—is that the nutritional products at issue cause necrotizing enterocolitis (“NEC”), a serious or fatal illness for preterm infants.
The NEC product liability litigation is an egregious example of plaintiff-side forum shopping. Although the vast majority of the 12,500 plaintiffs in pending NEC suits reside outside of Illinois, 97% of them have filed in notoriously plaintiff-friendly St. Clair County or Madison County, Illinois against out-of-state manufacturer Mead Johnson. Having moved its principal place of business to Indiana years earlier, that company was not “at home” in Illinois when the suits were filed, and the company had no case-specific ties to Illinois relevant to the multitude of out-of-state plaintiffs. Nonetheless, a St. Clair County trial court ruled that it can exercise personal jurisdiction over Mead Johnson.
The Appellate Court of Illinois affirmed and the Illinois Supreme Court denied review. As a result, Mead Johnson has filed a certiorari petition, captioned Mead Johnson & Co., et al. v. Clarissa Greear, et al., No. 26-29, seeking U.S. Supreme Court review.
On behalf of the Atlantic Legal Foundation, joined by the Federation of Defense & Corporate Counsel, Larry Ebner has authored and filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to grant review in order to affirm and enforce its due-process personal jurisdiction principles and thereby curb abusive forum shopping.
ALF & FDCC Amicus Brief
ALF & FDCC point to the NEC product liability litigation as a blatant example of plaintiff-side forum shopping. Their brief explains why the Illinois state courts’ assertion of personal jurisdiction over Mead Johnson encourages rather than restrains abusive forum shopping. The brief discusses why such forum shopping not only is unfair and deprives out-of-state corporate defendants of due process, but also seriously undermines the nation’s civil justice system. This is why the Supreme Court repeatedly has decried forum shopping in numerous contexts.
The amicus brief also explains why lax enforcement of personal jurisdiction principles leads to forum shopping that upsets the balance of interstate federalism, i.e., each state’s coequal status under the Constitution. A state court that asserts jurisdiction over an out-of-state corporation by failing to adhere to the Supreme Court’s well-established personal jurisdiction principles encroaches upon the sovereignty of states where exercise of personal jurisdiction would be proper.