When Joinder Is Not Feasible

When Joinder Is Not Feasible

Finding that an absentee is required does not put the absentee in the case. Rule 19(a)(1) imposes its duty to join only on a person who is subject to service of process and whose joinder will not deprive the court of subject-matter jurisdiction,¹ so the court must ask a second question: can it actually bring this person in? Courts call joinder feasible when three conditions hold. The court can exercise personal jurisdiction over the absentee, joinder will not undermine subject-matter jurisdiction, and the absentee makes no valid objection to venue.² Immunity can add a fourth obstacle, because an absentee that is immune from suit in federal court cannot be forced into the case.³ The full inquiry therefore runs in three steps: whether the absentee is required, whether joinder is feasible, and, if it is not, whether the absentee is so important that the case cannot go forward without the person.⁴ This unit covers the middle step.

Each obstacle comes from one premise: Rule 19 regulates who may be a party and gives the court no power of its own. A federal court can bind only those it has power to reach. Unless Congress has authorized broader jurisdiction for the type of suit, a federal court may exercise personal jurisdiction over an out-of-state defendant only to the extent the courts of the state where it sits could,⁵ so an absentee beyond the forum state's reach stays beyond the federal court's, however central the person is to the dispute. Subject-matter jurisdiction works the same way. In a diversity case the statute requires complete diversity of citizenship,⁶ and adding an absentee who shares citizenship with an opposing party would destroy the basis on which the case stands. Calling the absentee required cannot cure either defect, because that label describes the person's relation to the dispute and confers no power over the person or the subject matter.

When an absentee can be served and joined, Rule 19(a)(2) leaves the court no discretion: it must order the person made a party.⁸ When joinder cannot be accomplished, the court turns to Rule 19(b) and must determine whether, in equity and good conscience, the action should proceed among the existing parties or be dismissed.⁹ Infeasibility therefore opens a balance and does not end the case; the action may have to be abated only if, in equity and good conscience, it cannot proceed without the absentee.¹⁰ The balance begins with how a judgment entered without the person might prejudice that person or the existing parties.¹¹ It is practical for a reason: the committee behind the 1966 amendments faulted earlier cases for "undue preoccupation with abstract classifications of rights or obligations, as against consideration of the particular consequences of proceeding with the action."¹² Sometimes the balance ends in dismissal. In Makah Indian Tribe v. Verity, the competing tribes were parties to be joined under Rule 19(a) but could not be brought in because of tribal sovereign immunity from suit, and the action was dismissed.¹³

The obstacles differ in what they test, so the sections below take them one at a time. The first concerns the court's power over the absentee as a person.

Personal Jurisdiction and Service

Rule 19(a)(2) commands that the court "must order that the person be made a party," but the command reaches only a person who is required and who can in fact be made a party.¹⁴ The rule's opening condition explains the limit. The text quoted in Helzberg's Diamond Shops v. Valley West Des Moines Shopping Center begins by addressing a person who is subject to service of process and whose joinder will not deprive the court of jurisdiction over the subject matter,¹⁵ and the current Rule 19(a)(1) keeps that opening.¹⁶ Service of process is the formal delivery of the summons and complaint that gives a court power over the person served. Joinder aims at one judgment that settles the controversy among everyone with a stake in it, and a judgment can settle it only for people the court can reach. A person beyond the court's process therefore falls outside the order to join, however closely tied the person is to the dispute.

Geography sets the limit. Under Rule 4(k)(1)(A), a federal court may exercise jurisdiction over a defendant "who is subject to the jurisdiction of a court of general jurisdiction in the state where the district court is located," so its power reaches no further than the state court's would.¹⁷ If Gable sues Leigh in federal court in California, and Congress has not authorized broader jurisdiction for that type of suit, the court can reach Leigh only if California's long-arm statute and the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause would let California's courts do so.¹⁸ Service itself has a territorial edge. In Haas v. Jefferson National Bank of Miami Beach, a footnote records that the attempted service in Ohio was ineffective because it fell beyond the territorial limits of the district court in Florida.¹⁹ A summons carries only as far as the court that issued it, and delivering one outside that reach does not make the recipient a party.

Missing personal jurisdiction is one of the situations in which the court cannot order joinder, and in each of them the court must go on to decide whether, in equity and good conscience, the case can proceed in the nonparty's absence.²⁰ Helzberg shows that second step. The district court granted Helzberg a preliminary injunction, and Valley West moved to dismiss because of Lord's absence from the suit, even though the injunction might lead Valley West to try to end Lord's leasehold in space 261 of the mall. Lord's was not subject to personal jurisdiction in the Western District of Missouri, so the district court had to decide whether Lord's was indispensable; after weighing the Rule 19(b) factors, it concluded that Lord's was not.²¹ The Eighth Circuit agreed and held that denying the motion to dismiss was not error. It began with prejudice. Even if Valley West tried to terminate the lease, Lord's would keep all of its rights under its lease agreement, and none of its rights or obligations would have been adjudicated in a proceeding to which it was not a party.²² That is the first Rule 19(b) factor, the extent to which a judgment rendered in the person's absence might prejudice that person or the existing parties.²³ A defendant who argues that the case cannot continue without an absentee raises the point by motion under Rule 12(b)(7).²⁴

Infeasibility opens a balance, instead of ending the case, because the alternative would hand every stakeholder a veto. If an absentee beyond the court's reach automatically defeated the suit, a person with a stake in a dispute could block it by staying out of the forum, and a plaintiff with a good claim would lose it to a stranger's address. Rule 19(b) asks instead how much harm a judgment without the absentee would cause, and the Helzberg court started there.

A problem from a secondary source shows the same jurisdictional gap leaving the plaintiff with nowhere else to go. P claims in federal court that a 1998 transfer was a completed gift, and the defendant is the estate of X. Y's interests are clearly implicated, but Y's presence would destroy diversity and Y is not subject to personal jurisdiction in New York state court. The court can shape relief to declare only the rights as between P and the estate and make clear that the judgment does not bind Y personally. The estate, as representative of X's interests, is before the court and can adequately defend the claim. Dismissal would leave P without an adequate alternative forum. Balancing these factors, the court should treat Y as a necessary but not indispensable party and let the action proceed.²⁵ The common mistake is to treat missing personal jurisdiction as an automatic ground for dismissal. It moves the analysis from the order to join to the Rule 19(b) balance, and nothing more.

Subject-Matter Jurisdiction

The duty to join reaches only a person whose joinder will not deprive the court of jurisdiction over the subject matter, and the Federal Rules cannot loosen that condition. The version of Rule 19(a) quoted in Provident Tradesmens Bank & Trust Co. v. Patterson put the limit in its opening sentence,²⁷ and the current rule keeps it.²⁸ The Supreme Court may make rules for the orderly conduct of federal business, but it may not use its rulemaking power to expand jurisdiction, and Rule 82 says that the rules do not extend or limit the jurisdiction of the district courts.²⁹ Subject-matter jurisdiction is therefore an implicit limit on joinder in every case, and it binds Rule 20 as it binds Rule 19: parties joined under Rule 20 must also satisfy federal subject-matter jurisdiction requirements.³⁰ A court cannot acquire jurisdiction over a claim by deciding that the claim belongs in the case. In diversity cases the obstacle is almost always the same one. The statute requires complete diversity of citizenship, so an absentee who shares citizenship with an opposing party would break the rule.³¹

Haas v. Jefferson National Bank of Miami Beach shows that the absentee's importance cannot excuse the defect. The Fifth Circuit reasoned that the diversity statute requires complete diversity, that the policy of the statute calls for its strict construction, and that it is immaterial that the nondiverse party has been required to be joined as an indispensable party.³² The reasoning is structural. The label required measures how much harm the absence would cause, and a measure of harm cannot create power. A rule that excused the defect because the absentee matters greatly would let the label confer jurisdiction.

Whether an absentee's citizenship destroys diversity depends on the side the absentee would occupy, so the court must first align the absentee with one party or the other. Torrington Co. v. Yost shows how much turns on that step. Torrington sued its former employee Yost, seeking among other things an injunction limiting Yost's employment at INA for eighteen months, and Yost moved to dismiss under Rule 19 for failure to join INA, contending that INA's absence would prejudice him and impair INA's interests.³³ Torrington and INA were both Delaware citizens. If INA were aligned as a plaintiff with Torrington, that shared citizenship would not defeat diversity, as long as Yost was not a Delaware citizen. If INA were aligned as a defendant, Delaware citizens would stand on both sides and diversity jurisdiction would fail.³⁴ INA's citizenship is the same either way. The side the absentee's interest selects decides the result, so a comparison of citizenship alone leaves the analysis unfinished.

Infeasibility, once found, decides nothing about the outcome, and the two cases that follow it prove the point. In Provident the Court applied the "equity and good conscience" test of Rule 19(b), observing that subdivision (b) directs the court's inquiry whenever joinder is not feasible, and held that the court of appeals erred in not allowing the judgment to stand.³⁵ In Torrington the court dismissed. Its fourth factor, whether the plaintiff will have an adequate remedy if the case is dismissed, supported dismissal because Torrington could sue Yost and INA together in state court, where diversity is unnecessary and the parties can adjudicate the entire dispute in a single action.³⁶ A later section takes up the factors that separate the two outcomes.

A court facing a nondiverse required person might hope that supplemental jurisdiction supplies the missing authority. When a case rests on federal question jurisdiction, the statute gives the court discretion to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over all properly joined plaintiffs or defendants, including related state-law claims.³⁷ When original jurisdiction rests solely on diversity, 28 U.S.C. § 1367(b) takes that option away. It withholds supplemental jurisdiction over claims by plaintiffs against persons made parties under Rule 14, 19, 20, or 24, and over claims by persons proposed to be joined as plaintiffs under Rule 19 or seeking to intervene as plaintiffs under Rule 24, whenever exercising it would be inconsistent with the requirements of § 1332.³⁸ The provision exists to preserve the complete diversity rule.³⁹ If the parties those rules bring in could ride along, a plaintiff could add a nondiverse person through a joinder rule and call the added claim supplemental, and the diversity requirement would lose its force. The bar reaches every requirement of § 1332, so it applies to the amount in controversy as well as to citizenship.

Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Allapattah Services, Inc. left one oddity in this area. The Court held that ancillary supplemental jurisdiction may support claims by plaintiffs added under Rule 20, without regard to the amount in controversy of those claims, so long as the added party does not destroy complete diversity.⁴⁰ Section 1367(b) bars supplemental jurisdiction for persons proposed to be joined as plaintiffs under Rule 19 but does not list Rule 20, so a person who merely may join can use supplemental jurisdiction while a person who must join cannot.⁴¹ Because the statute speaks plainly about Rule 19, the quirk changes no result when a Rule 19 absentee is the problem.

Venue Objections

Rule 19(a)(3) states the third obstacle in a single sentence: "If a joined party objects to venue and the joinder would make venue improper, the court must dismiss that party."⁴³ Venue is the question of which federal district is a proper place to hear a case, and the rule treats it differently from the other two obstacles. The opening words of Rule 19(a)(1) screen out a person who cannot be served or whose joinder would destroy subject-matter jurisdiction, and venue is absent from that opening. It has its own subdivision, which operates only when the joined party raises the objection.⁴⁴ Courts nonetheless count the absence of a valid venue objection as the third condition of feasible joinder.⁴⁵

The difference in design follows from what each requirement protects. Subject-matter jurisdiction marks the outer edge of the court's power, which the parties cannot enlarge by agreement, so the court must police it whether or not anyone complains. Venue exists for the convenience of the person who would otherwise have to defend in a distant place, and that person is the best judge of whether the forum is tolerable. That purpose explains both features of subdivision (a)(3). The objection belongs to the joined party, so an existing defendant cannot assert it for a newcomer, and a joined party who raises no objection leaves the court with nothing to decide. The remedy is also narrow. The court dismisses that party and leaves the action in place, because the objection says only where the person can be sued and says nothing about whether the claim among the existing parties belongs in the district.

The usual error is to read the dismissal in subdivision (a)(3) as the end of the lawsuit. The subdivision removes a party, and whether the action survives the loss is the Rule 19(b) question that follows every failed joinder. That question begins with the extent to which a judgment entered without the person might prejudice that person or the existing parties.⁴⁶ A defendant who contends that the case cannot continue without the dismissed person presents that contention by motion under Rule 12(b)(7), which a later section covers.⁴⁷

Rule 19(a)(3) acts only when a venue defect and the joined party's objection come together. Doyle has no defect to point to, and Reyes has a defect but makes no objection, so neither creates an obstacle and joinder stands. Pruett has both the defect and the objection, and so Pruett leaves the case. The later section on timing and waiver takes up how long an objection stays available.