Keathley v. Buddy Ayers Construction, Inc. · ¶42
This Court’s precedents do not justify the current state of judicial-estoppel doctrine, either. The Court has apparently enforced judicial estoppel only a single time, in an original-jurisdiction case that did not resemble many of the cases in which lower courts now apply it. See New Hamp shire v. Maine, 532 U. S. 742 (2001). Because New Hampshire was an original-jurisdiction case, the Court understood itself to have greater flexibility in adjudicating the dispute than lower courts have in ordinary diversity actions. Cf. Massachusetts v. Missouri, 308 U. S. 1, 15 (1939) (explaining, even after Erie, that controversies between States are decided based on “the accepted principles of the common law or equity systems of jurisprudence”). Moreover, the Court applied the doctrine based on prior litigation between the same two parties. It estopped New Hampshire from adopting a new position…Read in context ›
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