United States Surety Company v. Stevens Family Limited Partnership et al
Filing
6
MEMORANDUM Opinion and Order Signed by the Honorable Milton I. Shadur on 10/25/2011:Mailed notice(srn, )
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
EASTERN DIVISION
UNITED STATES SURETY COMPANY,
Plaintiff,
v.
STEVENS FAMILY LIMITED
PARTNERSHIP, et al.,
Defendants.
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No.
11 C 7480
MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER
United States Surety Company (“Surety Company”) has filed a
Complaint against Stevens Family Limited Partnership
(“Partnership”), Thomas Stevens, Lillia Stevens, Matthew Stevens
and Edna Howard, seeking to invoke federal subject matter
jurisdiction on diversity of citizenship grounds.
Because that
effort is impermissibly flawed in that Surety Company has failed
to carry its burden of establishing such jurisdiction, this sua
sponte memorandum opinion and order dismisses both the Complaint
and this action on jurisdictional grounds--but with the
understanding that if the present flaw can be cured promptly, the
action may then be reinstated.
As to Surety Company, Complaint ¶1 properly identifies both
components of its corporate citizenship under 28 U.S.C.
§1332(c)(1), while Complaint ¶¶3 through 6 properly set out the
Illinois citizenship of all four individual defendants.
But all
that Surety Company’s counsel say as to Partnership is simply
this (Complaint ¶2):
Defendant Stevens Family Limited Partnership is an
Illinois partnership with its principal place of
business in Chicago, Illinois.
As that language reflects, Complaint ¶2 speaks only of facts
that are jurisdictionally irrelevant when a limited partnership
is involved.
Those allegations ignore more than a dozen years of
repeated teaching from our Court of Appeals (see, e.g., Smart v.
Local 702 Int’l Bhd. of Elec. Workers, 562 F.3d 798, 803 (7th
Cir. 2009), citing among other cases Cosgrove v. Bartolotta, 150
F.3d 729, 731 (7th Cir. 1998)).
And that teaching has of course
been echoed many times over by this Court and its colleagues.
For a good many years this Court was content simply to
identify such failures to the lawyers representing plaintiffs in
pursuance of its mandated obligation to “police subject matter
jurisdiction sua sponte” (Wernsing v. Thompson, 423 F.3d 732, 743
(7th Cir. 2005)).
But there is really no excuse for counsel’s
present lack of knowledge of such a firmly established principle,
after well over a full decade’s repetition by our Court of
Appeals and others.
Hence it seems entirely appropriate to
impose a reasonable cost for such a failing.
Accordingly, as stated earlier, not only Surety Company’s
Complaint but also this action are dismissed (cf. Held v. Held,
137 F.3d 998, 1000 (7th Cir. 1998)), with Surety Company and its
counsel jointly obligated to pay a fine of $350 to the District
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Court Clerk1 if a timely Fed. R. Civ. P. 59(e) motion hereafter
provides the missing information that leads to a vacatur of this
judgment of dismissal.
Because this dismissal is attributable to
Surety Company’s lack of establishment of federal subject matter
jurisdiction, by definition it is a dismissal without prejudice.2
________________________________________
Milton I. Shadur
Senior United States District Judge
Date:
October 25, 2011
1
That fine is equivalent to the cost of a second filing
fee, because after this dismissal a new action would have to be
brought if the defect identified here turns out to be curable.
2
On the hopeful assumption that the flaw set out here is
indeed curable, this Court is contemporaneously issuing its
customary initial scheduling order.
3
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