Colpitts v. Blue Diamond Growers
- John Cronan
- 1:20-cv-02487
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Colpitts v. Blue Diamond Growers, Judge Cronan identified issues for argument on Blue Diamond’s motion to dismiss but made no ruling.
Matthew Colpitts, the people he seeks to represent, and Blue Diamond Growers; the order concerns preparation for argument on Blue Diamond’s motion to dismiss.
What happened
Colpitts v. Blue Diamond Growers concerns Blue Diamond’s motion to dismiss Matthew Colpitts’s claims about the labeling of its product. The order does not state the claims’ ultimate merits or decide whether the case may proceed.
The court asked the parties to address whether Colpitts adequately alleged that he bought the product, paid a premium, and was misled under New York consumer-protection laws. It also identified questions about his request for an order governing future conduct, fraud, negligent misrepresentation, express and implied warranties, unjust enrichment, and the federal Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.
Judge John P. Cronan ordered the parties to be prepared to discuss those issues at oral argument scheduled for February 18, 2021. The order itself neither grants nor denies the motion to dismiss.
The detailed version
- Colpitts v. Blue Diamond Growers · No. 1:20-cv-02487
- John Cronan
- Feb. 8, 2021
Background
Matthew Colpitts brought the case individually and on behalf of other similarly situated people against Blue Diamond Growers. Blue Diamond filed a motion to dismiss. This order does not decide that motion; instead, it directs the parties to prepare for oral argument.
Issues Identified for Argument
The court directed the parties to be prepared to discuss:
- Whether the court may consider Colpitts’s assertion that he cannot rely on the product’s labels in the future and therefore avoids buying the product even though he would like to, when that assertion was not included in the complaint and was raised for the first time in his opposition brief. This issue concerns whether he has standing, meaning a sufficient legal interest, to seek an order governing future conduct.
- Whether the complaint adequately alleged a purchase under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 8 and 9(b), including whether the complaint had to provide enough purchase details for Blue Diamond to evaluate a possible statute-of-limitations defense.
- Whether the complaint adequately alleged that Colpitts paid a premium price without identifying prices for comparable competitor products.
- Under New York General Business Law §§ 349 and 350, whether a reasonable consumer would be affected by the product’s use of a trademark symbol after the word “Smokehouse.”
- The significance of the dictionary definition of “Smokehouse” as a noun describing a physical location, rather than an adjective describing a taste.
- Whether Colpitts waived, meaning gave up, responses to Blue Diamond’s arguments for dismissal of the fraud, negligent-misrepresentation, express-warranty, Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, and unjust-enrichment claims.
- Whether the economic-loss rule applies to the negligent-misrepresentation claim.
- Whether New York’s requirement of a direct buyer-seller relationship for some warranty claims applies to a product-mislabeling action.
- Whether the product could pass in ordinary trade without inspection under the contract description, as required for the claimed breach of implied warranty under New York Uniform Commercial Code § 2-314(2)(a).
- Whether the product’s label must qualify as a “written warranty” for a claim under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, and, if so, whether the label meets that law’s definition of a promise that the product will meet a specified level of performance over a specified period.
Action and Effect
Judge John P. Cronan ordered the parties to be prepared to discuss these topics at oral argument on Blue Diamond’s motion to dismiss, scheduled for February 18, 2021, at 1:00 p.m. The order does not resolve any claim, decide the motion to dismiss, or state whether any allegation is legally sufficient.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.