Carolina Cas. Ins. Co. v. Team Equip., Inc., No. 12-56203 (9th Cir. 2014)
Annotate this CaseCarolina filed suit asserting federal jurisdiction based on diversity against defendants for a declaratory judgment that Carolina was not liable under Dry Cleaning's insurance policy. The district court dismissed without leave to amend and, when Carolina filed a proposed amended complaint, the district court did not accept this complaint as sufficient because Carolina still pled its jurisdictional allegations on information and belief and still failed to establish the citizenship of some defendants. The court concluded that because the district court did not conclude that any amendment would be futile, the district court should not have dismissed the initial complaint with leave for Carolina to amend it to correct, as far as possible, the defective jurisdictional allegations; the district court should not have dismissed the complaint for failure to plead allegations of citizenship affirmatively and on knowledge, rather than on information and belief, when the necessary information was not reasonably available to Carolina; and, therefore, the court reversed and remanded.
Court Description: Diversity Jurisdiction. The panel reversed the district court’s dismissal based on failure to establish diversity jurisdiction. The panel held that the original complaint should not have been dismissed without leave to amend because the district court did not find that any attempt to amend the complaint would be futile. The panel also held that when information regarding a defendant that is necessary to establish diversity of citizenship is not reasonably available to a plaintiff, the plaintiff should be permitted to plead jurisdictional allegations as to those defendants on information and belief and without affirmatively asserting specific details regarding the citizenship of those defendants.
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