Preston Hollow Capital LLC v. Nuveen LLC
- P. Castel
- 1:20-cv-05597
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Preston Hollow Capital LLC v. Nuveen LLC, Judge Castel ordered corrected citizenship allegations within 30 days to support diversity jurisdiction.
Preston Hollow Capital LLC must provide the missing citizenship allegations and seek information from the defendant LLCs; the named defendants are affected by the information request.
What happened
In Preston Hollow Capital LLC v. Nuveen LLC, the court found that the complaint did not provide enough information to establish diversity jurisdiction, which allows certain cases involving citizens of different states in federal court.
The complaint did not identify the citizenship of the members of Preston Hollow Capital LLC or of three defendant limited liability companies. The court ordered the plaintiff to amend the complaint truthfully and accurately and to serve an information request seeking the citizenship of the defendant companies’ members.
Judge Castel gave the plaintiff 30 days to amend the complaint and warned that the diversity-jurisdiction allegations would be dismissed from the complaint if it did not do so.
The detailed version
- Preston Hollow Capital LLC v. Nuveen LLC · No. 1:20-cv-05597
- P. Castel
- July 22, 2020
Background
Preston Hollow Capital LLC sued Nuveen LLC, Nuveen Investments, Inc., Nuveen Securities LLC, Nuveen Asset Management LLC, and John V. Miller. The complaint relied on diversity jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a)(1). That form of federal jurisdiction generally requires more than $75,000 to be in dispute and citizenship in different states among the parties.
Jurisdictional Deficiencies
The court explained that a limited liability company has the citizenship of each of its members. When an LLC’s members include individuals or other entities, the jurisdictional allegations must identify the citizenship of those members and, for corporate members, the relevant incorporation and principal-business information.
The complaint did not allege the citizenship of Preston Hollow Capital LLC’s constituent members. It also did not allege the citizenship of the constituent members of Nuveen LLC, Nuveen Securities LLC, or Nuveen Asset Management LLC. Instead, it stated that each corporate party was organized and existing under Delaware law and identified John V. Miller as a resident of Illinois.
Order
The court ordered Preston Hollow Capital LLC to amend its complaint to allege truthfully and accurately the citizenship of each constituent member. It also ordered the plaintiff to serve an interrogatory—written discovery seeking information—on the defendant limited liability companies regarding the citizenship of their members. The plaintiff had 30 days to amend the complaint. The court stated that otherwise the diversity-jurisdiction allegations would be dismissed from the complaint. The opinion did not decide the underlying claims.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.