Franco v. Mabe Trucking Co., Inc., No. 19-30316 (5th Cir. 2021)
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Plaintiff filed suit in Texas district court against Mabe after plaintiff was involved in a car accident with a truck owned by Mabe and operated by a Mabe employee. The accident occurred in Louisiana, a few miles from its border with Texas. Although the Texas district court concluded that Mabe lacked sufficient contacts with Texas to subject the company to personal jurisdiction in the state, the Texas district court found that it was in the interests of justice not to dismiss the case and instead transferred it to the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, which was the federal district court sitting in the district in which the accident occurred. The Louisiana federal district court concluded that plaintiff's claims were time-barred and granted summary judgment for Mabe.
The Fifth Circuit reversed and remanded, concluding that 28 U.S.C. 1631 permitted the Texas district court to transfer this case to the Louisiana district court for lack of personal jurisdiction; the provisions of section 1631 apply irrespective of the Texas district court's invocation of 28 U.S.C. 1406(a); section 1631, which was specifically designed to protect federal litigants from the forfeiture that could result from a statute of limitations running after a plaintiff's mistakenly filing an action in a court that lacks jurisdiction if the interests of justice so demand, neither runs afoul of the Erie doctrine and the Rules of Decision Act it effectuates nor transgresses constitutional bounds; and section 1631 is therefore the standard against which the Louisiana district court should have measured whether the action had been timely filed in that court, and its application must necessarily precede that of the Louisiana Civil Code articles.
Applying section 1631, the court accepted that plaintiff is deemed to have filed his suit in the Louisiana district court on November 22, 2016, the date he actually filed suit in the Texas district court. Therefore, plaintiff must be deemed to have filed his claim "in a court of competent jurisdiction and venue" on that date and thereby interrupted the one-year prescriptive period under Louisiana law. Accordingly, the Louisiana district court erred by granting Mabe summary judgment on the basis that plaintiff's claim was time-barred.
The court issued a subsequent related opinion or order on July 8, 2021.
The court issued a subsequent related opinion or order on July 13, 2021.
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