Pet owners who sued two pet food makers over their requirements for a veterinarian’s prescription urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Aug. 5 to overturn a precedent that they fear will impede their case.
Since its filing in Missouri in 2019, the heavily litigated class action lawsuit has bounced around between state and federal courts.
“The jurisdictional skirmishes have consumed more than five years of judicial resources for a case that remains at the starting gate,” the pet owners said in newly filed court papers.
The precedent, Grable and Sons Metal Products Inc. v. Darue Engineering and Manufacturing, is hard to interpret, and state and federal courts have repeatedly struggled to ascertain its meaning, they say.
Grable held that federal courts can have jurisdiction over federal legal questions of substance even when those questions are raised during a claim based on a state law.
The court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case, Royal Canin U.S.A. Inc. v. Wullschleger, on Oct. 7.
Petitioner Royal Canin, which has a headquarters in St. Charles, Missouri, manufactures food for dogs and cats and is a subsidiary of Mars Inc., based in McLean, Virginia. Co-petitioner Nestlé Purina PetCare Co. is based in St. Louis.
Respondents Anastasia Wullschleger, who owns a dog named Clinton, and Geraldine Brewer, who owns a cat named Cassie, originally filed a proposed class action in the Circuit Court of Jackson County, Missouri, in February 2019.
The consumers say the pet food manufacturers imposed a veterinarian’s prescription requirement for the purchase of their products, which created false expectations about the power of the food to heal their sick pets and justified charging more for the products than for regular pet food. The prescription requirement was not required by law, they say.
The pet owners alleged that the companies worked together to convince consumers that some of their products were available only by prescription. They argued that the products they purchased were no different from cheaper products made by the same companies, did not contain medicine, and should not have required a prescription. They sued under Missouri’s antitrust and consumer protection laws and claimed that federal food and drug laws and regulations had been violated by the companies.
The companies intervened and, in March 2019, moved to transfer the case to federal court, arguing that questions of federal law were involved.
When the case returned to the federal district court, the pet owners amended their legal complaint to delete references to federal regulations and the federal questions the Eighth Circuit identified. The amended complaint reasserted their claims under state law, changing the antitrust conspiracy claim to a civil conspiracy claim.
The circuit court held that the deletion of the federal claims from the complaint succeeded in depriving federal courts of the authority to hear the case. The court ordered that the case be remanded to the federal district court with instructions to transfer it to the state court.
Royal Canin and Nestlé appealed to the Supreme Court, which granted their petition without comment on April 29.
Both sides have since filed briefs with the court previewing their upcoming arguments.
“For almost a century, this Court—and nearly every lower court” has held that removing federal claims from a complaint does not end federal courts’ jurisdiction over a case, the brief states.
The Eighth Circuit’s decision “radically breaks” from federal law and “permits plaintiffs to engage in aggressive judge and forum shopping” and should be reversed, the brief asserts.
They recounted that when they sued in state court, they cited alleged violations of the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act by the companies but ultimately were allowed to proceed in state court.
However, the Grable precedent, which could eventually end up depriving them of the right to proceed, should be overruled because it is “entirely unworkable,” they argued in the brief.
The federal issues raised in the state law claim “are plainly not substantial and may not even be disputed,” their brief states.
“No federal issue is necessary, since the pet owners could prevail on each claim without them. Placing ordinary state-law claims like these into federal court upsets the federal and state court balance,” the pet owners’ brief states.
The fact that the Eighth Circuit reversed the federal district court two times is proof of how hard it is to apply the Grable test, whose “reasoning is unpersuasive,” according to the brief.
“Overturning it will save decades of pointless litigation with minimal offsetting costs,” the brief states.
