United States Ninth Circuit

In an appeal arising from Multidistrict Litigation brought against defendants-telecommunications companies offering interstate service by customers subject to defendants' federally filed tariffs, dismissal of state and federal law claims is affirmed in part and reversed in part where: 1) dismissal of plaintiffs' Federal Communications Act (FCA) claims was proper; 2) complete preemption does not apply to federal regulation under the FCA; 3) denial of one plaintiff's motion for a remand was error as its claim was not preempted; 4) some state law claims were preempted based on the filed-rate doctrine; 5) the file-rate doctrine was inapplicable to the extent plaintiffs asserted claims that neither attacked the rates nor required reference to the filed-rate for a calculation of damages; 6) Truth-in-Billing regulations should not be applied retroactively, and thus, dismissal of certain Truth-in-Billing claims was proper; and 7) dismissal of one claim under the Truth-in-Billing regulation was erroneous as it did not rest on retroactive application of the regulation, nor did it rest on a determination of the reasonableness or validity of the filed tariff.

Appellate Information

• Argued 10/18/2006
• Decided 07/10/2007
• Published 07/10/2007

Judges

• WALLACE, Senior Circuit Judge:, Before:  J. CLIFFORD WALLACE, ANDREW J. KLEINFELD, and JAY S. BYBEE, Circuit Judges.

Court

• United States Ninth Circuit

Counsel

• For Appellant:
  
• Robert S. Green, Green Welling LLP, San Francisco, CA;  Daniel F. Johnson, Breskin Johnson & Townsend PLLC, Seattle, WA, for the plaintiffs-appellants.


• For Appellees:
  
• Joseph A. Boyle and Danny E. Adams, Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, Parsippany, NJ, and Vienna, VA, for the defendants-appellees.