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University of Miami Law Review

Abstract

This Article explores the Eleventh Circuit’s precedent that has struggled with an unusual Georgia choice-of-law rule. The rule in question applies when the conflicting law of a sister state is a common law rule or doctrine (such as in tort or contract law) rather than a specific statute and has been a feature of Georgia law since the 19th century. The approach has lingered in scattered Georgia and related federal cases over many decades but was not given much attention in modern times until the Georgia Supreme Court decided to reaffirm and amplify it unanimously and defiantly in Coon v. Medical Center (2017). The Medical Center rule is based on a long-discredited legal fiction that The Common Law is a body of “natural” law that “exists” separately and apart from what judges actually do and cases actually say in specific jurisdictions.

Under the Medical Center rule, Georgia courts are to presume that the common law of a sister state is the same as the common law in Georgia (even if its case law is quite different from Georgia’s) and thus will apply Georgia law―if the sister state was one of the original thirteen American colonies or was derived from the territory encompassed in one of the colonies. On the other hand, if the sister state was never part of the original thirteen colonies or their territories, “[t]here is no presumption that the common law of England exists in such a State” because the state clearly did not “inherit its laws from England.”

The Medical Center rule has the most dubious distinction of being the only American state-choice-of-law rule that requires lawyers and judges to consult historical maps in order to apply it–that is, if the rule is to be applied in accordance with its stated parameters and underpinnings in antebellum jurisprudence, a jurisprudence which has been soundly rejected after the American Civil War everywhere, it appears, other than in Georgia. This rule is fundamentally at odds with the Constitutional limits on legislative jurisdiction delineated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tomkins (1938), Klaxon Co. v. Stentor Electric Manufacturing Co. (1941), and Phillips Petroleum Co. v. Shutts (1985).

Prior to 2021, federal courts occasionally drew on the doctrine which was later reasserted by the Georgia Supreme Court in Medical Center. However, the Eleventh Circuit’s decisions in cases such as Mount Hawley Insurance Co. v. East Perimeter Points Apartments (2021) and Barrs v. Auto-Owners Insurance Co. (2024) have significantly magnified and exacerbated this unconstitutional course in dealing with a choice of law between Georgia’s law and that of other states completely outside of the scope of the Medical Center’s geographic choice-of-law rule. The Circuit’s lead has, in turn, led a succession of federal district courts astray, further compounding the impact of the Medical Center decision in District Courts that had already embraced a narrower version of the erroneous doctrine.

The Article concludes with a sustained argument that when the first opportunity next presents itself, the Eleventh Circuit should abandon the Medical Center rule and resolve choice-of-law issues in federal diversity cases appealed from federal district courts in Georgia using another test (such as the Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws)―one that does not raise serious problems of constitutionality because it does not mechanically presume to impose Georgia’s antebellum vision of The Common Law. As Justice Brandeis declared in Erie, “the unconstitutionality of the course pursued has now been made clear and compels” the Eleventh Circuit to take swift action to disavow it.

In the event a party files a petition for a writ of certiorari from an Eleventh Circuit decision disavowing the “unconstitution[al] . . . course” reaffirmed by Medical Center, the U.S. Supreme Court should grant certiorari and take the opportunity to overrule the doctrinally unsound Klaxon precedent that makes possible Erie mistakes such as the one that has expanded the Medical Center rule. If the Supreme Court either declines to exercise its certiorari jurisdiction in such a case―or takes the case and declines to overrule Klaxon―then it is time for Congress to legislate a consistent, nationwide federal body of choice-of-law rules for the federal courts, the need for which has been recognized for decades.

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