“Inextricably Intertwined” Explicable at Last?: Rooker-Feldman Analysis After the Supreme Court’s Exxon Mobil Decision

The Supreme Court\u27s March 2005 decision in \u27Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Industries Corp.\u27 substantially limited the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, under which lower federal courts largely lack jurisdiction to engage in what amounts to de facto review of state-court decisions. Exxon Mobil\u27s holding is quite narrow--entry of a final state-court judgment does not destroy federal-court jurisdiction already acquired over parallel litigation. But the Court\u27s articulation of when Rooker-Feldman applies, and its approach in deciding the case, have significant implications for several aspects of Rooker-Feldman jurisprudence. Chief among our claims is that although the Court did not expressly repudiate or limit the applicability of the inextricably intertwined formulation from prior cases, which had been a primary test for many lower courts, that concept appears to have been relegated to some secondary role and no longer to be a general or threshold test. The Exxon Mobil Court properly did not elaborate on just what the concept\u27s role should be, but we offer a suggestion based on an earlier Ninth Circuit decision. We also discuss the apparent impact of Exxon Mobil on other aspects of Rooker-Feldman doctrine as the lower federal courts had developed it, including relation to preclusion doctrines, the significance of whether the federal plaintiff was plaintiff or defendant in state court, and the doctrine\u27s applicability a) to those not parties to prior state-court litigation, b) to interlocutory state-court rulings and decisions of lower state courts, and c) when federal-court plaintiffs did not raise their federal claims in state court. A February 2006 per curiam decision applying Exxon Mobil, Lance v. Dennis, reinforces the Court\u27s position on some of these issues

Reign of Error: District Courts Misreading the Supreme Court over Rooker–Feldman Analysis

Seventeen decisions in nine U.S. district courts from 2006 through 2019 have taken a demonstrably misgrounded starting point for Rooker–Feldman analysis. The cases have read language from a 2006 Supreme Court opinion, in which the Court quoted criteria stated by the lower court, as their guideline. But the Court summarily vacated the lower court’s judgment, and it had previously articulated, and has repeated, different criteria for federal courts to follow. The district-court decisions all appear to have reached correct results, but the mistake about criteria should be recognized and avoided as soon as possible before it creates potential mischief. And more generally, the recurring mistake highlights the importance of attention to detail in the drafting and reading of judicial opinions