 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
Philip Morris Inc. v. Angeletti5/16/2000
otion for Stay be granted pending this Court's decision on the present Petition for Writ of Mandamus and/or Writ of Prohibition.
II. Arguments
We shall lay out the stated positions of the parties in this section, and discuss certain arguments in more detail throughout the opinion. Petitioners argue that this Court should issue a writ of mandamus or prohibition because irreparable harm will result to the parties and the judicial system if Petitioners are required to await end-of-the-case appeal. According to Petitioners, the opportunity to appeal the class certification might not arise until the Phase III trials are well underway, which, if class certification is improper, would entail a tremendous waste of judicial resources. Hence, we are urged to compel the Circuit Court to decertify the classes as an exercise in aid of our appellate jurisdiction or, in the alternative, as an execution of this Court's superintendency, whether inherent or bestowed, over the lower courts of this State.
Petitioners contend that the Circuit Court grossly abused its discretion in certifying the class action in violation of Maryland Rule 2-231 and Petitioners' constitutional rights. They maintain that because of the number of individual liability issues involved in this litigation, the Circuit Court grossly abused its discretion in holding that Respondents met the class action requirements of predominance, superiority and manageability. Most notably, the Circuit Court either ignored or glossed over several significant individual issues, such as conflict-of-laws, contributory negligence, assumption of the risk, statutes of limitation, fraud and reliance, and causation, the aggregation of some or all of which precludes certification.
Finally, Petitioners attribute four errors of law to the Circuit Court in rendering its decision. First, Petitioners argue that the splitting of interrelated issues, most notably general liability to the classes and causation of injury to individual class members, violates their federal and Maryland constitutional rights. Petitioners additionally assert that the Circuit Court erred in certifying a medical monitoring class, that it impermissibly separated punitive damages from liability determinations, and that class counsel suffer from a conflict of interest ethically disabling them from representing the classes, and thereby creating illicit, fail-safe classes.
Respondents counter that this Court lacks the power to issue writs of mandamus or prohibition. According to Respondents, our decision in In re Petition for Writ of Prohibition, 312 Md. 280, 539 A.2d 664 (1988), in which we recognized that "mandamus or prohibition may issue in aid of appellate jurisdiction," id. at 302, 539 A.2d at 675, was superseded by Title 8, which governs appellate procedure in the Court of Appeals and which does not expressly provide for writs of mandamus or prohibition. Even if appellate review is appropriate at this time, Respondents assert that this Court cannot properly assert jurisdiction without offending the "primary jurisdiction" of the Court of Special Appeals: we must wait until the matter, presumably in the form of a petition for writ of mandamus or prohibition, is pending in the intermediate appellate court, at which point we would be free to exercise our powers of certiorari.
Assuming that this Court does have the authority to issue such a writ, Respondents exhort that we rule the present petition untimely because Petitioners did not file it with this Court until seventy days after the Circuit Court's January 28, 1998 order granting Respondents' Motion for Class Certification. "To the extent that non-statutory appellate jurisdiction is recogni
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 Maryland Personal Injury Attorneys
Personal Injury Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|