As the leaves change for the fall in Washington, the Justices may cast their thoughts back to their own days studying Federal Courts in law school, when they consider Dart Cherokee Basin Operating Co. v. Owens on the second day of the Term. The question presented could have come straight out of a law-school exam.

The Class Action Fairness Act (the “CAFA”) allows defendants to remove class actions to federal courts if they involve at least one hundred putative class members and at least $5 million in controversy. The question presented is whether a notice of removal is adequate if it simply asserts the facts necessary to satisfy the jurisdictional bar, without attaching evidence that documents the truth of those facts. Because Dart had failed to do so, the Tenth Circuit held that its notice was defective. The Supreme Court has agreed to review Dart’s challenge to that holding.

Dart’s brief on the merits is succinct and to the point. Indeed, its lawyers seem to have taken the recent admonition by Chief Justice John Roberts that they should keep their briefs short to heart, and then some: its principal brief on the merits does not even fill 23 pages – that is, less than half of the normal length. And Dart packs a compelling argument into those twenty-three pages. Presumably the biggest thing Dart has going for it is the general sense that federal courts are supposed to prefer “notice” pleading, and that requirements of particularized detail are either outmoded or reserved for the specific areas covered by enactments like Rule 9 and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act.

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