Press reports say that Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the New York Times, two of its reporters, and Penguin Random House, is assigned to Judge Steven Merryday who works out of the United States District Court Tampa Florida Division.
As far as I know, the alleged misdeeds were committed in New York City.
How was the venue determined? And will it remain in Tampa?
P.S. Some may have seen today’s headlines saying that the lawsuit was dismissed. But the President’s lawyers can and, almost surely will, make changes, and then resubmit it to the same judge. So this thread is still relevant.
Florida is Trump’s official residence and, since the NYT and Penguin do lots of business in Florida they can file there.
IANAL and find which jurisdiction something is filed in a bit of a mystery.
Doubtless Trump was hoping for a conservative judge but, this time, he got a respected judge so did not work out as well for him this time (the judge was very critical of Trump’s lawyers on this one but since it is a procedural thing they gt 28 days to refile and, as you said, almost certainly will).
I know jurisdiction shopping is a thing these days and this seems that.
ETA: I am surprised the NYT and Penguin do not have some language somewhere in their publications that specify where you have to sue them if you want to go that route. Seems to work for other companies.
It works for other companies because in some way you agreed to it as a customer. Even if Trump has a subscription to the NYT (which I doubt) their current terms requires subscribers to agree to arbitration for issues related to the subscription or use of the NYT ‘s services and it specifies that for excluded issues , the venue will be in NY county. But again, that’s only if Trump agreed as part of subscribing. I started my subscription so long ago that I just called on the phone and didn’t agree to anything.
Defamation is a tort, and the basic principle in tort law is that jurisdiction is determined by “the place of the wrong”. That’s the starting point, but it’s difficult to apply in defamation cases. On the one hand you can argue that “the wrong” is the publication, so jurisdiction should lie with the court where the publisher is located; but others argue that “the wrong” is the impact the defamation has on the claimant’s reputation, and that impact is suffered at the claimant’s place of domicile (which for Trump is Florida). It’s an old debate in tort law and in conflict of law and described nicely in this blog entry.
This question hasn’t quite been answered, so let me try a variation on it.
Trump is domiciled in Palm Beach County. That is in the Florida Federal Court Southern District. Google maps tells me that there is a Federal Courthouse in that county four miles from Mar-a-Lago.
Why is the assigned judge from Tampa, which is 207 miles away, in the Middle District?
If Trump’s lawyers can pick any federal district where the New York Times is sold in a fancy hotel’s lobby, and there is at least one bookstore, could they have chosen a seemingly more favorable venue such as Wyoming?
I would assume as your subscription renews there is some updating of the Terms and Conditions you agree to so, I would think you have even if you didn’t know it.
There isn’t any renewal - I subscribed to home delivery in 1995 ish without any paperwork. They will deliver until I cancel. It’s not like a magazine subscription where I subscribe for a particular term.
Sure, there have been price increases and they notify me of them. Still don’t agree to anything - they send me an email with the new price and effective date, just like they used to put a note in the paper in the days before email. I get the notice far enough in advance of the effective date to cancel before it takes affect. There’s no response needed .The only real change in the past 30 years is that now I get billed every X number of weeks, while 30 years ago, the carrier collected in person every week.