Dominguez v. 10 Roads Express, LLC

Background

David Jr. Dominguez filed a proposed class action in Alameda Superior Court asserting various state-law wage-and-hour claims against 10 Roads Express, LLC and an individual. The defendants removed the case to federal court, relying on federal-question jurisdiction and diversity jurisdiction. They later withdrew the diversity-jurisdiction argument, leaving only whether a federal question supported removal.

The court’s analysis

The party seeking removal bears the burden of showing that the federal court has subject-matter jurisdiction. The defendants argued that federal law preempted the state claims. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration had issued a 2018 order concluding that California meal-and-rest-break laws, as applied to commercial vehicle drivers, were preempted by federal regulations. The Ninth Circuit had upheld the agency’s authority to make that determination.

The court explained that a federal defense, including ordinary preemption, generally does not create federal-question jurisdiction. The narrow exception is complete preemption, where federal law so completely displaces a state-law claim that the claim is treated as federal. The court stated that complete preemption has been recognized in only limited contexts and that the defendants had offered no tenable basis for applying it here.

The defendants also argued that the state court could not overturn the federal agency’s order and therefore could do nothing except find the claims preempted. The court rejected that argument. It concluded that the state court had jurisdiction over the state-law case and could evaluate and rule on the preemption defense, even though it did not have authority to overturn the agency’s order.

Disposition

Judge Richard Seeborg granted Dominguez’s motion to remand. The opinion did not decide whether the state-law claims are actually preempted; it decided only that the asserted preemption defense did not provide a basis for federal removal jurisdiction.