Buffolo Creek Disaster

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In the next, the author talked about where to sue the company, in here it connected with diversity of citizenship. At first, the author wanted to sue in his home territory, which was located in Washington, he also considered suing in New York where Pittston’s home base located. However, he found out that Pittston Company could always transfer the case from Washington or New York to West Virginia. So the author decided to sue the case in West Virginia’s federal court, which is the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia. In order to get into federal court, the plaintiff must sue the Pittston Company, which is not the same state as where the plaintiff settled. The author took a risk and only based on the diversity to sue only Pittston Company. The only way they can success is to reveal Buffalo Mining Company’s corporation veil. They need to have sufficient facts and evidence that the Pittston had the reasonability of this disaster.

In what we learned this spring, for a case to process in federal court, there must be federal subject matter jurisdiction and courts can have subject matter jurisdiction in two ways, one is exclusive jurisdiction and the other one is concurrent jurisdiction. In this case the author can bring the court to federal because of the diversity of citizenship in concurrent jurisdiction, because the plaintiff was from West Virginia and defendant was from the state of New York. This was meet one of the diversity requirement that diversity of citizenship must be complete in opposite side of “v.”

The author also researched on West Virginia’s law and found out that the maximum recovery for those who killed by other was only $110,000, the author wanted to find a way to get around West Virginia’s wrongful death limits. The author thought about punitive damage, punitive damage are the large amount of money the defendant must pay to the plaintiff in order to punish the defendant and remind them not having the same conduct again. The author needs to find the reprehensibility of the defendant’s conduct. As what we learned in class there are five factors to determine how reprehensible a defendant conduct was, one of the factor the satisfied was the first one which is the harmed caused physical or economical harm, however, mental suffering and psychic impairment were considered weak, and people who lost their property may not meet the money requirement. So the author needs to find some countable and powerful stories that can be review by the judge.

In Conclusion, the book The Buffalo Creek Disaster is a great book helps me better understanding the civil procedure in the Untied States and I can incorporate the knowledge I learned in the class, which are the knowledge of personal jurisdiction, there was personal jurisdiction over the Pittston Company in the State of New York because it is will the company’s headquarter located; Also the author can sue the company in federal court because of diversity of citizenship; and lastly punitive damage, he helped victims got a good amount of compensation. I am very admiring Gerald M. Stern; from this book I learned that he is a very responsible and a justice lawyer. He helped the victims, which are the plaintiff got $13.5 million settlement, which makes me feel uplifting!