This case involves plaintiff Jerry Chapman suing defendant Commonwealth Land Title Insurance Company over an alleged unearned fee of $260.50 charged for a lender title insurance policy during the refinancing of his home mortgage in 2007, claiming he was entitled to a discount under Texas law for a reissue policy issued within five years of a prior loan. The complaint asserted claims for money had and received, unjust enrichment, violation of RESPA (12 U.S.C. § 2607(b)), and breach of implied contract. On summary judgment, the court held it had subject matter jurisdiction over the state law claims and dismissed the unjust enrichment claim with prejudice, reasoning that under Texas law unjust enrichment is not an independent cause of action but merely a theory of recovery that duplicates the money had and received claim. The claims for money had and received and breach of implied contract were allowed to proceed.
In United States v. Wali, the defendant moved to suppress a firearm seized during a warrantless stop and frisk by police responding to a 911 call reporting a person carrying a handgun in a residential area. The court granted the motion, ruling that the seizure violated the Fourth Amendment because the officers lacked reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. The 911 call was treated as an anonymous tip lacking sufficient indicia of reliability, and merely carrying a firearm does not establish illegality, with the tip's description also not perfectly matching the defendant. The court relied on precedents like Florida v. J.L. to conclude that the tip did not justify the stop and frisk.
The case involved healthcare providers suing Aetna for unpaid services provided to enrollees in an Aetna Medicare HMO plan after the third-party administrator Heritage went bankrupt. The bankruptcy court had administratively closed the case to require exhaustion of Medicare remedies but later reopened and remanded it to state court after Fifth Circuit and Texas Supreme Court decisions eliminated the exhaustion requirement for such claims. Aetna appealed the reopening, arguing the claims were time-barred due to lack of diligence in exhausting remedies. The district court affirmed the bankruptcy court's order, reasoning that administrative closure does not trigger statutes of limitations and that the bankruptcy court properly exercised its discretion to remand based on equitable factors.
The case involved a former DynCorp employee who sued under the False Claims Act's whistleblower retaliation provision after being fired for raising concerns about improper government payments. The court had previously dismissed the claim as time-barred under the 90-day limitations period of the Texas Whistleblower Act rather than a longer residual personal injury statute. In this opinion, the court denied the plaintiff's post-judgment motions to reconsider and alter the dismissal, holding that the limitations period in effect when the suit was filed applied, the Dodd-Frank Act's three-year period enacted afterward did not change the result, and the plaintiff had not shown manifest error, new evidence, or an intervening change in law under Rule 59(e).
In Chatelaine, Inc. v. Twin Modal, Inc., the plaintiff sued the defendant after a shipment of wine was delayed and damaged by heat during interstate transport from California to Texas, bringing claims for breach of contract, negligence, violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, negligent hiring, and liability under the federal Carmack Amendment. The court granted in part the defendant's motion to dismiss and dismissed the negligence, TDTPA, and negligent hiring claims with prejudice. The court reasoned that the Interstate Commerce Act broadly preempts state law claims regulating the interstate transportation of goods except for routine breach-of-contract claims between private parties, drawing on the Supreme Court's analysis of analogous preemption under the Airline Deregulation Act.
The case involved a former DynCorp employee who sued the company and two supervisors under the False Claims Act's anti-retaliation provision, 31 U.S.C. § 3730(h), alleging he was marginalized and fired after reporting that the company was receiving unearned government payments under a contract. The defendants moved to dismiss on the ground that the suit was filed 178 days after the termination and was therefore untimely. The court granted the motion and dismissed the claim with prejudice, holding that the applicable statute of limitations was the ninety-day period borrowed from the Texas Whistleblower Act rather than the two-year personal-injury period or the three-year period added by the later-enacted Dodd-Frank Act, which the court found did not apply retroactively. The court also denied leave to amend because any amendment would be futile given the time bar.
