The lawsuit at issue in In re Refco, Inc. Secs. Litig., 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 32798 S.D.N.Y. April 21, 2008) was commenced in Cook County Circuit Court, removed to the Northern District of Illinois and transferred to the Southern District of New York as part of the Refco multi-district litigation. The Seventh and Second Circuit have different views as to the breadth of bankruptcy removal jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1452(a). Because, at the end of the MDL, the case would be returned for trial to the federal court in Chicago, the plaintiff argued that Seventh Circuit law should be applied, while the defendants relied on more expansive Second Circuit law. Judge Lynch considered this analytical approach mistaken:

Preliminarily, the issue of whether to apply Second or Seventh Circuit "law," as the Trustee frames it, is not a proper "choice of law" question. Although it is meaningful to ask whether New York or Illinois state law governs a case — because New York and Illinois are distinct sovereignties, each with power to regulate transactions within the scope of its legislative jurisdiction as it sees fit — there is no such thing as "Second Circuit law" or "Seventh Circuit law" in this sense, as intermediate federal courts of appeals have no such sovereignty. As the Second Circuit has put it, "[f]ederal courts comprise a single system applying a single body of law, and no litigant has a right to have the interpretation of one federal court rather than that of another determine his case." Desiano v. Warner-Lambert & Co., 467 F.3d 85, 91 (2d Cir. 2007)(emphasis added), quoting Menowitz v. Brown, 991 F.2d 36, 40 (2d Cir. 1993)("Although federal courts sometimes arrive at different constructions of federal law, federal law (unlike state law) is supposed to be unitary" (emphasis added)). References to "the law of this Circuit," while common and appropriate, are essentially figures of speech, reflecting the fact that federal courts are part of a hierarchy of precedential authority, in which lower courts are bound by the precedents of the appellate courts to which they are subject. While these precedents may vary, due to human frailty and the occasional difficulty of interpreting the applicable laws, every federal court in the land is obliged to apply this "unitary" federal law, interpreted as best that court can in light of the precedents that bind it. Menowitz, 991 F.2d at 40.

Moreover, "[t]his obligation does not change in the context of transferred cases." Desiano, 467 F.3d at 91. The Second Circuit has specifically instructed that although district judges should "give most respectful consideration to the decisions of the other courts of appeals and follow them whenever [they] can," a "transferee federal court" has an independent obligation to "apply its [own] interpretations of federal law, not the constructions of federal law of the transferor circuit." Id., quoting Menowitz, 991 F.2d at 40. Indeed, if "a federal court simply accepts the interpretation of another circuit without [independently] addressing the merits, it is not doing its job." Id. (alteration in original), quoting Menowitz, 991 F.2d at 40.

There may be questions on which prudence dictates reference to the decisions of other circuits. Where, for example, as in cases transferred under the MDL process, a case will be returned to the transferor court for trial, see Lexecon v. Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, 523 U.S. 26, 40, 118 S. Ct. 956, 140 L. Ed. 2d 62 (1998), it may make sense for the transferee court to consult the "law" of another circuit to anticipate how the trial will be conducted, and to make rulings that will facilitate such a trial. But this principle can have little application to a matter as fundamental as subject matter jurisdiction. A federal court is obligated to assure itself of its own jurisdiction, sua sponte if necessary, and in doing so it must apply the law as it understands it, and as it is bound by precedent. The converse of the present situation illustrates the point: if the circuit with authority over the transferor court took a broad view of a jurisdictional statute, it would be extraordinary if a transferee court should accept jurisdiction of a case, where its own considered view, after according respectful attention to the non-binding prior decision of an out-of-circuit court, was that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction, simply because some other court erroneously believed that jurisdiction was present. The same would be all the more true if the circuit court by whose precedents the transferee court was bound had authoritatively held that jurisdiction was lacking under the circumstances. In this case, it is the transferor circuit that takes the narrower view of the jurisdictional question, but the need for this Court to undertake its own inquiry of subject matter jurisdiction is no less necessary.

Held, “this Court will undertake its own independent analysis of subject matter jurisdiction, informed by the precedents of the Second Circuit, to determine whether the Trustee's claims are sufficiently "related to" the Refco bankruptcy to establish federal jurisdiction.”