WASHINGTON—U.S. District Judge Catherine Blake has reclaimed jurisdiction—at least temporarily—over two health-related lawsuits that she recommended be sent to other courts only last month.
The turnabout was indirectly prompted by the addition of South Korean giant L.G. Electronics Mobilecomm U.S.A. Inc. as a defendant in two of five class-action headset suits. The suits seek to force cell phone carriers to supply consumers with headsets to lower their exposure to phone radiation otherwise deemed unsafe by government health and safety agencies.
LG last month had two headset suits moved to federal courts Maryland and Pennsylvania. LG argued the Class Action Fairness Act—passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush last year—gives rise to a new cause of action. LG’s legal move encouraged Cingular Wireless L.L.C. and other cell phone companies to ask Blake to reconsider her Feb. 15 “suggestion of remand” regarding two headset suits and a brain cancer suit.
The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, which combines similar lawsuits from around the country and assigns them to a federal judge, issued a 15-day conditional remand on March 1 in response to Blake’s Feb. 15 remand ruling.
Blake said new issues raised by LG’s inclusion in headset litigation—and the return of two suits to federal court—need to be addressed by plaintiffs and defendants.
“To permit full briefing of the defendants’ Motion to Reconsider, and of any Motion for Remand that may be filed by the plaintiffs, which cannot be accomplished in the 15-day period of the conditional transfer order, it seems advisable to withdraw the Suggestion of Remand filed with the clerk of the MDL Panel pending resolution of the status of Pinney and Farina [headset cases],” Blake said.
Blake tossed out an $800 million brain cancer suit against Motorola Inc. and others in 2002 and rejected five class-action headset suits against industry in 2003. A federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., overturned the latter Blake ruling in 2005, and the wireless industry failed to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to review the lower court ruling.
As such, after a string of legal victories in the 1990s and early 2000, industry has watched a steady stream of health-related cases move back to state courts around the country. Blake herself remanded six brain cancer suits to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in 2004. Still pending before the D.C. Superior Court are industry’s motion to dismiss the cancer suits and the Federal Communications Commission’s request to join the litigation in support of the wireless industry.
Last June, Blake also returned to the D.C. Superior Court a suit filed by Sarah Dahlgren. Dahlgren, on behalf of herself and others, asserts cellular companies failed to make consumers aware of possible health risks and differences within the scientific community on the question of biological effects from phone radiation.
