Professor Rory Bahadur's Article Cited by U.S. District Court

Professor Rory Bahadur's article, "Maritime Removal: An Unlikely Heuristic for Anchoring Three Non-Textual Principles of Original Federal Jurisdiction" at 43 Journal of Maritime Law & Commerce 195 (2012), was cited by the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington in its Coronel v. AK Victory opinion on February 28, 2014.

The opinion interprets the removal statute 28 U.S.C. Section 1441 as requiring the remand of a maritime claim brought by an employee on a factory trawler in Alaska against his employer. The employer invoked three recent decisions in the Southern District of Texas refusing remand on the grounds that amendments to section 1441 in 2011 erased the prior barrier to removal or maritime claims. The court ultimately decided that remand was appropriate.

Professor Bahadur's article argues that removal is inappropriate based on the structure of the constitutional grant of admiralty jurisdiction and the lack of a removal provision for admiralty action in the first judiciary act of 1789.