Erie doctrine

The judge never even knows it happened.

Okay, we have to cover the most notoriously abstract doctrine in civil procedure, the Erie doctrine.

Oh, Erie.

We are in federal court based on diversity jurisdiction, meaning we are dealing exclusively with state law claims.

Whose rules apply?

It's the classic question.

Reading these Erie doctrine notes, it feels exactly like a guest referee showing up to officiate a local backyard sports game.

Does the referee use the official national rule book, or do they have to adopt the weird local field rules?

What would we say about the Court of Appeals opinions?

I don't know that you need to address them, because under the Erie Doctrine, this court looks to the highest court in the state, and in this case, that is Whalen, and Whalen has spoken directly to this issue, and so I believe that is as far as this court needs to go.

Well, I understand,

but the Court of Appeals cases say we've looked at, at least Blackburn overlooked or didn't mention Whalen, but this JMW case, and I guess Ondo to some extent says we've looked at Whalen, and We don't read the way you're reading it.

So then we were left with JMW, which explicitly, that acknowledged the discrepancy between Blackburn and Whelan, and then just explicitly and inexplicably decided to follow another Court of Appeals case instead of the Supreme Court.

And so for those reasons, I do believe that the Court of Appeals cases were wrongly decided.

But I do believe that under the Erie Doctrine, this court can just simply say, we have to look to the Missouri Supreme Court first.

It has spoken broadly as to this issue, and that is where the court's analysis can end.

There's some complexities I won't go into about all that, but they are faithless to that.

Point four, we've talked a bunch about Erie and the importance of state law as construed by state courts.

The essential issues in this case are about state constitutional law- And the state Supreme Court has ruled on those issues.

And finally, point five, the arguments that they're actually making on the Federal Constitution are completely preposterous.