Court blocks nonresidents from state suit

Heart patients from around the nation who say the anticlotting drug Plavix has caused sometimes-fatal internal bleeding cannot sue the manufacturer in San Francisco, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday in the latest of a series of decisions to restrict litigation against multistate companies.

The 8-1 ruling reversed a decision last year by the California Supreme Court, which would have allowed a nationwide suit against manufacturer Bristol-Myers Squibb by 86 Californians and 592 residents of other states to proceed in a state court in San Francisco. Although the company is based in New York, it has five offices in California, had Plavix sales of more than $900 million over a sixyear period, and conducted nationwide advertising that could be judged in a single court, the state justices said.

That’s not enough to allow a California court to decide non-Californians’ claims of

harm by a non-California company, said the nation’s high court.

Bristol-Myers “did not develop Plavix in California, did not create a marketing strategy for Plavix in California, and did not manufacture, label, package or work on the regulatory approval of the product in California,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion.

The California plaintiffs can sue the company here, but “the nonresidents’ claims involve no harm in California and no harm to California residents” and cannot be heard in a California court, Alito said.

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling “hands one more tool to corporate defendants determined to prevent the aggregation of individual claims” into a single suit. Bristol-Myers is being sued for its “nationwide conduct,” she said, and some aggrieved customers might not be able to afford separate lawsuits in their own states.

Monday’s ruling is the latest to back companies facing wide-ranging lawsuits. The Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that Argentines who accused Mercedes-Benz of colluding with Argentina’s government to brutally repress their relatives in the late 1970s and early 1980s could not sue the German auto company in California, where it had substantial sales but was not headquartered.

Last month, the court barred a Montana lawsuit against a railway company by former employees who lived and were injured in other states, and, in another case, restricted the courts in which patentholders could file suits for violations of their rights.

In Monday’s ruling, the court “continued its push-back against forum-shopping,” said Rusty Perdew, a Chicago business lawyer not involved in the case. “The decision brings predictability to companies that operate nationwide by limiting the states in which they can be sued.”

But Robert Peck, an attorney who filed arguments on behalf of a plaintiffs’ lawyers organization called the American Association for Justice, said the ruling “will make it more difficult to hold corporations accountable” for harming large numbers of people.

Plavix thins the blood to avoid clotting and is prescribed for patients who have suffered heart attacks or strokes. Potential side effects include bleeding and bruising, but U.S. health agencies consider the drug safe if properly taken and monitored.

However, the lawsuit claims that Plavix increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes and that Bristol-Myers has failed to disclose those dangers while falsely promoting the drug’s safety. Eighteen of the claims were brought by relatives of patients who have died.

The case has been on hold while the opposing sides argue over whether it could be heard by a single court in California or by courts elsewhere.

Although courts would apply the same set of laws to each plaintiff ’s claim — most likely, the laws of the state where the drug was purchased — plaintiffs prefer a joint action in a state such as California with lawyers well versed in product liability and willing to take on a case with a potentially large payout.

The case is BristolMyers Squibb Co. vs. Superior Court of California, San Francisco County, 16-466.