SPRINGFIELD – All seven Supreme Court Justices agreed that Madison County courts violated the U.S. constitution by exercising jurisdiction over claims with no connection to Illinois.
On June 4, the Justices tossed 160 plaintiffs from other states out of injury suits that two local residents filed against Bayer Corporation.
Justice Mary Jane Theis wrote, “Illinois has no particular interest in resolving claims that did not arise out of or relate to activities that occurred here.”
The Justices relied on a U.S. Supreme Court precedent from 2017, shutting down national litigation against Bristol-Myers Squibb in California state court.
American businesses hadn’t won such a victory in Illinois since 2005, when the Illinois Supreme Court shut down national consumer class actions in Avery v. State Farm.
Liberal Justices James Kilbride and Scott Neville accepted the result.
In a special concurrence they adopted the views of U.S. Justice Sandra Sotomayor, who dissented from the Bristol-Myers Squibb decision.
The decision will apply to asbestos suits, according to a January article quoting Catherine Weiler of Swanson Martin and Bell.
She asked if a Mississippi man had a claim in Illinois against Bendix Corporation of Ohio for making automobile brakes that exposed him to asbestos.
“It’s going to hugely affect the asbestos bar but they’re not litigating any of this so they don’t have the ability to stop the train,” Weiler said.
Unlike the Bayer suits that involved many plaintiffs and one defendant, asbestos suits involve one plaintiff and many defendants – dozens and sometimes hundreds.
In a sample of 25 complaints that asbestos lawyers filed in Madison County from May 20 to 28, two plaintiffs resided in Illinois.
Four came from Texas and two each from Florida, Minnesota, Virginia, New York, and California. Michigan, Alaska, Idaho, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Mississippi, Wisconsin, and North Carolina each produced one suit.
In the roughly one-week sample, 23 claimants from other states named 952 defendants, mostly from other states.
The Bayer suits started in 2016, with former Third Circuit chief judge Ann Callis representing Madison County residents Christy Rios and Nicole Hamby.
They claimed a permanent birth control device, Essure, injured them. They alleged negligence, strict product liability, breaches of express and implied warranties, and fraud.
Callis and associates from Texas and California added 94 plaintiffs from 25 states to Rios’s suit. They added 85 plaintiffs from 21 states to Hamby’s suit.
In all, the roster of plaintiffs included 21 from Illinois and 160 from other states.
Circuit Judge Dennis Ruth took Rios’s suit and Circuit Judge William Mudge took Hamby’s suit.
In 2017, after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision, Bayer moved to dismiss the Madison County suits.
Callis amended the complaints to allege that Bayer “used Illinois to develop, label, or work on the regulatory approval for Essure.”
She claimed Bayer accredited doctors and created a marketing strategy in Illinois.
Bayer moved again to dismiss, and Ruth and Mudge held a hearing.
They denied the motion, relying on a decision the First District issued against Glaxo Smith Kline in 2016.
That decision identified an indisputable interest in clinical trials with Illinois doctors and subjects.
Ruth and Mudge found that Bayer purposefully directed activities at Illinois and that claims against it arose from contacts with Illinois.
Bayer appealed, and Fifth District judges affirmed the joint ruling in May 2019.
Justice Thomas Welch wrote, “Bayer directly targeted and marketed in Illinois, conducted clinical trials in Illinois, contracted with Illinois physicians and facilities, and established a physician accreditation program in Illinois.”
He wrote that dismissing plaintiffs from other states wouldn’t serve judicial economy and would run a risk of conflicting rulings.
Justices David Overstreet and Randy Moore concurred.
The Illinois Supreme Court reversed the Fifth District’s decision, erased the First District’s precedent, and set the Bristol-Myers Squibb decision as its standard.
Theis wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court chided California’s supreme court for permitting jurisdiction without adequately linking the state to the claims.
“The drug was not prescribed to the nonresidents in California, they did not purchase it in California, and they were not injured by it in California,” Theis wrote.
“The Court noted that the out of state plaintiffs could pursue their claims elsewhere, including by joining in a consolidated action in states that had general jurisdiction over defendant.”
She asked whether claims arose from or related to physician training and marketing strategy.
She answered, “We find that they do not.”
Theis wrote that any assertion that Bayer manufactured Essure devices in Illinois or established manufacturing procedures there were conspicuously absent.
She wrote that plaintiffs alleged dissemination of false and misleading information but failed to allege they or their physicians received it in Illinois, that devices of nonresident plaintiffs weren’t implanted in Illinois and that plaintiffs didn’t dispute Bayer’s assertion that many nonresident plaintiffs initiated duplicate actions in California.
Chief Justice Anne Burke concurred, as did Justices Rita Garman, Lloyd Karmeier, and Michael Burke.
The special concurrence of Kilbride and Neville honored the memory of national litigation in state courts.
Kilbride wrote, “In my opinion, there is nothing fundamentally unfair or inefficient about allowing an Illinois court that has jurisdiction over an Illinois resident’s claims to adjudicate the largely identical claims of a nonresident plaintiff.”
He wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court made it profoundly difficult for those injured in different states to sue a defendant in a single consolidated action.
He expressed serious reservations about such an approach but wrote that the court must consider federal constitutional principles to resolve the dispute.
Bayer issued a statement following the ruling, saying it was pleased with the decision.
"The Court found in its opinion that 'no adequate link exists between Illinois and the nonresident plaintiffs’ claims' and that plaintiffs 'identified no other activity that would connect their specific claims to Illinois,'" the statement reads.
"The company will continue to vigorously defend itself against the remaining Illinois claims. The company stands behind the product’s safety and efficacy, which are demonstrated by an extensive body of research, undertaken by Bayer and independent medical researchers, involving more than 200,000 women over the past two decades."