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In Wright v. Utd. Serv's Auto. Ass'n, No. 1:23-cv-11155-ADB. 2025 WL 2617842 (D. Mass. Sept. 10, 2025), a District Judge turned a potential humiliation into an opportunity to send a message to an appellate court.
The District Judge, sitting in the District of Massachusetts, had already certified a question of great public importance for an immediate appeal to the federal appellate court that governed, which is the First Circuit Court of Appeals. The question concerned whether "the" Filed Rate Doctrine required dismissal of the plaintiffs' claims which required a determination whether the defendants had overcharged the insurance rates involved in the case.
The First Circuit sent a letter, I guess you would call it, to the District Court, a procedure which I personally have never seen before. In basic terms, they asked the District Judge to respond with its own Memorandum to clarify what was such an important public issue that they had to address it. Rather than view this as a potential humiliation of simply putting a lower court in its place which is a common phenomenon whenever the U.S. supreme court is involved these days, for example, the District Court in this case took this as an opportunity to get the First Circuit to answer some controlling questions of law.
These questions control the ways in which federal courts approach the subject of Filed Rate Doctrines in insurance cases. While it becomes obvious that the First Circuit's answers to these questions, if they answer them, have implications for insurance litigation throughout the United States, the very questions themselves have implications across the nation.
Here are the questions, with supporting citations supplied by the District Judge removed for your ease of reference:
1. When a federal court, sitting in diversity, needs to determine whether the filed-rate doctrine applies to bar a claim, should it look to state law or federal common law to determine whether the filed-rate doctrine applies to Massachusetts state agencies? [Citations omitted.]
2. If federal common law is the appropriate source of law, does the federal filed-rate doctrine apply to bar claims that implicate rates set by Massachusetts state agencies, or does it apply solely to those set by federal agencies? [Citations omitted.]
3. If federal common law would apply the filed-rate doctrine to rates set by Massachusetts state agencies, is the doctrine quasi-preemptive, such that it applies to broadly bar legal or equitable challenges that implicate filed rates, as Defendants contend, or does it apply only to direct challenges to the rates themselves, as Plaintiffs contend?
Wright, 2025 WL 2617842, at *2. Determinative questions. How will the First Circuit respond? How will other courts, federal and state Courts alike, respond?
This is a case to follow.
Filed Rate Doctrines are explored in three Sections of my Book on Insurer Bad Faith, 2 DENNIS J. WALL, LITIGATION AND PREVENTION OF INSURER BAD FAITH §§ 11:26, 11:26.50, and 11:26.75 (3d Edition Thomson Reuters West Publishing Co. with 2025 Supplements).
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