If insurance law is state law, why are so many of the Covid coverage cases in federal court? Any lawyer knows the answer: diversity jurisdiction. When a defendant from one state is sued in state court by a plaintiff from another state, that defendant typically can remove the case to federal court . There are 1099 federal cases in the CCLT database as of today. 358 of those cases started in state court, and were removed to federal court by the insurance company defendant.
There are 380 state cases in the CCLT database. Because state courts don’t have uniform, accessible electronic dockets, we’re sure that there are many more state cases that we don’t know about. Using the method explained in this post, we estimate that there may be as many 553 additional state cases that should be in our database, for a total of over 900 total state cases — nearly as many as there are in federal court.
Please use the CCLT case list to check to see if your state cases are missing. You can search the list using the search tool, and you can sort it by state, title, and court. Let us know what we’re missing by emailing cclt@law.upenn.edu.
