The Sixth Circuit ruled that a complaint on which a trial court had certified a class that included every person subject to the laws of Ohio must be dismissed. The complaint was filed by Kevin Hardwick, a firefighter, against ten companies that allegedly manufactured or otherwise distributed PFAS. He originally sought to represent a class of nearly all Americans. The court noted, “Seldom is so ambitious a case filed on so slight a basis.” While the defendants argued that the plaintiff failed to allege facts that plausibly supported any element of standing, the Sixth Circuit began and ended its analysis on the standing element of traceability, i.e., that the injury was likely caused by the named defendants. The court found as defective the approach in the complaint to treat the defendants as a collective unit rather than including specific allegations against each defendant. The court noted that the Supreme Court has made clear that “standing is not dispensed in gross” and even a plaintiff who meets the actual-injury requirement under the Court’s standing jurisprudence does not thereby “obtain a license to sue anyone over anything.” Further, the court found that the plaintiff’s allegation that the named defendants manufactured or otherwise distributed PFAS, of which there are thousands, was “patently insufficient to support a plausible inference that any of them bear responsibility” for the five particular PFAS found in Hardwick’s blood. The court remanded the case to the district court that had certified the class with instructions to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.
