Lawyers for about 3,000 plaintiffs suing GlaxoSmithKline over its drug Avandia may have been able to skirt federal jurisdiction under the Class Action Fairness Act but were ultimately stymied in their effort to get out of U.S. court by the rules on diversity jurisdiction.
In an opinion including an appeal to Congress to fix CAFA, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania kept 45 of the cases on her Avandia multidistrict litigation docket and granted the plaintiffs’ motion for remand to California state courts in eight of the cases.
