Last year in this column (“Getting Your Company’s Case Removed to Federal Court When Sued in Your ‘Home’ State” (Dec. 19, 2017)), we told you about a vigorous debate in federal district courts across the country over a controversial federal-court removal tactic called “snap removal,” see Arthur Hellman,”Neutralizing the Stratagem of ‘Snap Removal’: A Proposed Amendment to the Judicial Code,” 9 Fed. Cts. L. Rev. 103 (2016). That tactic involves avoiding the so-called “forum defendant rule,” a statutory bar against removing state-court suits where one of the defendants is a citizen of the state in which the action is filed, but where the suit has not yet been served. How? By filing a notice of removal in federal court after the state-court suit is filed but before the state-court suit has been effectively served, a tactic enabled by modern technology and the ability to electronically monitor more and more state-court dockets on a real-time basis.

Cases too numerous to count have taken a diversity of positions on the legality of these snap removals, evoking questions at the heart of statutory interpretation—How strictly must courts follow the literal text of a statute? When is a reading of the statute’s literal text too absurd or bizarre to pass muster? Can legislative history or a statute’s perceived purpose overcome its literal text and, if so, when?