Flight MH370 plaintiff wants SCOTUS to review forum doctrine, claiming ‘disarray’ below

The estate of a Texas man who presumably died in the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 asked the US Supreme Court last week to address “disarray” and “confusion” in the lower courts about the deference trial courts owe to US plaintiffs in forum non conveniens determinations. Thomas Wood is the executor of the estate of his deceased brother, Philip Wood, a US citizen and IBM employee who was on temporary assignment in Malaysia immediately before the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines plane he was traveling aboard. Thomas Wood filed a suit against Boeing, which designed and manufactured the vanished 777, in state court in Illinois. He also sued Malaysian Airlines in federal court. After Boeing removed the Illinois suit to federal court, both of Wood’s suits ended up in consolidated multidistrict litigation before US District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in Washington, D.C. In 2018, Judge Jackson dismissed Wood’s claims along with those of dozens of other plaintiffs, finding that Malaysia is the proper forum for litigation over the plane’s disappearance. The trial judge acknowledged that Wood’s case against Boeing presented “perhaps the closest call,” because the suit involved a US plaintiff suing a US corporation on behalf of a dead US citizen over alleged defects in a product designed and manufactured in the US. But much of the evidence would be from Malaysia, she said, and the case would be complicated by any Boeing attempt to rope in Malaysian defendants.<br/>