Sаskatchewan Mutual Insurance (SMI) is trying to enforce a Canadian judgment against CE Design in federal court. That judgment resulted from CE Design’s unsuccessful effort to enforce an earlier Illinois judgment against SMI in Saskatchewan. The question before us is whether the federal courts—the third set of tribunals that have played host to this decade-long legal battle—have jurisdiction over the latest round. We conclude that the answer is no—an outcome that is especially appropriate given the comity concerns that pervade this litigation.
I
CE Design is an Illinois corporation whose business now appears to center on litigating claims under the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), 47 U.S.C. § 227. It brought the present suit as a class action in Illinois state court against Homegrown Advertising, which was then a Canadian marketing firm; the complaint accused Homegrown of sending junk faxes to CE Design in violation of Illinois law and the TCPA. The two sides settled in February 2007 for $5 million plus interest and costs. Several points about the settlement are noteworthy. First, Homegrown failed to notify its insurer, SMI, about the litigation, and instead hired its own counsel in Illinois. SMI learned of the case only in May 2006. Second—and one suspects related to point onе—the February 2007 settlement was structured to be enforceable only against Homegrown’s commercial liability policy with SMI.
In March 2007, CE Design (to which Homegrown had assigned all its rights under the policy) filed a citation to discover assets in the Lake County, Illinois, circuit court in an effort to recover some or all of the judgment from SMI. At that point Rod Rath, SMI’s Canadian attorney, wrote a letter to the circuit court advising that SMI was denying coverage. SMI took no other steps to fight the citation on the merits. On May 3, 2007, the Illinois court entered judgment for CE Design. Skirmishes over the settlement have continued in the state courts since thаt time. (Years later, Homegrown was dissolved under the law of Saskatchewan, but that is of no moment, since CE Design has been the real party in interest since the assignment.)
Our concern is with a subplot of the wider story. As the state court litigation unfolded, CE Design decided to try another tack: enforcement of the Illinois judgment in Saskatchewan, where SMI is based. The gambit failed. On January 8, 2008, the Queen’s Bench, which is the court of first instance in the province, concluded that SMI had not received sufficient notice of the Illinois judgment and thus that it was unenforceable. The Saskatchewan court- also awarded SMI “costs ... in respеct of this application ... [of] $1,000.” That is where matters stood for seven years, but more was to come. In June 2015, SMI revived the issue by filing a motion to enforce the Saskatchewan judgment in federal district court. We can assume that SMI is interested in more than the $1,000 (Canadian) to which the Saskatchewan judgment entitled it; recognition and enforcement of the Saskatchewan judgment may undermine the Lake County settlement. Or it may not. We may reach that potentially difficult question only if the district court had subject-matter jurisdiction over SMI’s action. We thus turn immediately to that issue, as did the district court.
Two possible bases for jurisdictiоn have been advanced: the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA), 28 U.S.C. § 1332(d), and the alienage branch of diversity jurisdiction, 28
II
We begin with CAFA, which authorizes federal courts to hear class actions “if the class has more than 100 members, the parties arе minimally diverse, and the ‘matter in controversy exceeds the sum or value of $5,000,000.’ ” Standard Fire Ins. Co. v. Knowles,
These questions, however, are beside the point. Even if we thought that the amount-in-controversy requirement had been satisfied, SMI faces a more fundamental obstacle: CAFA “applies only where there is a plaintiff class, not a dеfendant class.” Good,
Good’s application of CAFA is fully in line with the statutory text. Although Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 allows “[o]ne or more members of a class [to] sue or be sued as representative parties” on behalf of a class, the key jurisdictional language in CAFA speaks only of plaintiff classes. Compare Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(a) (emphasis added) with 28 U.S.C. § 1332(d)(2). Nowhere in section 1332(d)(2) does the phrase “defendant class” appear, and references to the “defendant” or “defendants” consistently place them in opposition to the “class.” See, e.g., § 1332(d)(2)(A) (“any member of a class of plaintiffs is a citizen of a State different from any defendant”). If we had any remaining doubts, the enacted findings that accompanied CAFA would resolve them. Congress stressed that “abuses of the class action device” harmed “the free flow of interstate commerce,” and that state courts were “bias[ed] against out-of-State defendants.” Class Action Fairness Act of 2005, Pub. L. 109-002, 119 Stat 4 (2005);
Perhaps recognizing this, SMI has a fallback argument: it asserts that it is the de facto defendant and so CAFA applies by its terms. This is so, it says, because it was the defendant in the Saskatchewan action and it is merely enforcing the resulting judgment—a ministerial matter that preserves the judgment’s substance, including the parties’ positions relative to the “v.” We understand the point, but the reality remains that it was SMI that invoked the federal court’s authority. And as this ease well illustrates, registration of a judgment (or a stand-alone action on a foreign judgment) is not always a rote administrative task. Cf. Good,
Counsel for SMI asserts that judgments entered by the courts of Canada (or other foreign countries) are entitled to “full faith and credit” in the United States, but the matter is more complicated than that. The law of Illinois governs recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in state court, and Illinois has enacted the Uniform Foreign Money-Judgments Recognition Act, 735 ILCS 5/12-618 et seq., and the Uniform Enforcement of Foreign Judgments Act, 735 ILCS 5/12-650 et seq. Those statutes confer on judgments of foreign countries the same status as judgment of sister states, and grant those foreign judgments full faith and credit. CE Design Ltd. v. Healthcraft Prods., Inc.,
Federal courts sitting in diversity usually apply recognition and enforcement rules of the state in which the federal court sits. See generally 18B Charles Alan Wright, Arthur R. Miller & Edward H. Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure § 4473 (2d ed. 2002). Cf. Semtek Int’l Inc. v. Lockheed Martin Corp.,
SMI’s position finds little support in decided cases; it has cited only two district court decisions, and they are of dubious relevance: Juneau Spruce Corp. v. International Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Union,
Comity considerations support the approach we are taking here. Comity “counsels lower federal courts to resist engagement in certain cases falling within their jurisdiction” out of “a proper respect for state functions.... ” Levin v. Commerce Energy, Inc.,
That leaves alienage jurisdiction, which requires complete diversity and an amount in controversy that “excеeds the sum or value of $75,000, exclusive of interest and costs.” § 1332(a). There is complete diversity, as we noted earlier. The record does not reveal, however, even a chance that at least one class member has put more than $75,000 in controversy. Unlike CAFA, in ordinary diversity cases “the generаl rule is that the claims of multiple litigants cannot be aggregated to reach the jurisdictional amount in controversy.” Good,
It is possible that SMI satisfies the second criterion. The class members are entitled to a pro rata share of the settlement award, and so the amount each member receives will be a function of the size of the class. In that sense, their individual claims are interdependеnt. SMI does not, however, satisfy the first requirement. A “common fund” exists when “plaintiffs share[ ] a preexisting (pre-litigation) interest in the subject of the litigation.” Id. (alteration in original) (citation omitted). In Good, as in our case, the class members’ claim was for the policy limits of an insurance policy—a claim that at first blush might seem to qualify as a “common fund.” Yet Good neverthеless found that the class members lacked the requisite pre-litigation interest because their claims “arose from separate transactions,” namely, the printing of a receipt or receipts by the defendant retailer. Id. The dispositive issue was the “nature of the right asserted,” not whether vindicаtion would “lead to a single pool of money that will be allocated among the plaintiffs.” Id. at 722 (quoting Gilman v. BHC Sec., Inc.,
Though the offending papers here are faxes instead of receipts, that detail does not matter. Each class member’s claim rests on a specific fax or faxes, and thus each claim stems from a separate transaction. It makes no difference that the class members now seek to satisfy their disparate claims from a single source. Nor are we persuaded by SMI’s attempt to distinguish Good factually by alleging the fax problem was the result of “a single fax blast campaign.” Even granting that the faxes were sent simultaneously from one source, they were received by 23,541 different entities. That defeats a finding of “common fund” for aggregation purposes.
IY
Neither CAFA nor conventional diversity jurisdiction empowers us to hear this matter, and so we AFFIRM the judgment of the district court dismissing this case for lack of subject-mаtter jurisdiction.
Notes
. The leading federal case on recognition and enforcement of foreign-country judgments remains Hilton v. Guyot,