Cite as: 505 U. S. 247 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
ents had contracted AIDS from a transfusion of contaminated blood during surgery, and naming as defendants the surgeon and the manufacturer of a piece of medical equipment used during the procedure. After discovering that the Red Cross had supplied the tainted blood, respondents sued it, too, again in state court, and moved to consolidate the two actions. Before the state court decided that motion, the Red Cross invoked the federal removal statute, 28 U. S. C. § 1441, to remove the latter suit to the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire. The Red Cross claimed federal jurisdiction based both on the diversity of the parties and on the "sue and be sued" provision of its charter, which it argued conferred original federal jurisdiction over suits involving the organization. The District Court rejected respondents' motion to remand the case to state court, holding that the charter provision conferred original federal jurisdiction. See District Court order of May 24, 1990, reprinted at App. to Pet. for Cert. 18a-25a.
On interlocutory appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed. 938 F. 2d 1494 (1991). The Court of Appeals compared the Red Cross Charter's "sue and be sued" provision with analogous provisions in federal corporate charters previously examined by this Court, and concluded that the relevant language in the Red Cross Charter was similar to its cognates in the charter of the first Bank of the United States, construed in Bank of the United States v. Deveaux, 5 Cranch 61 (1809), and in that of the federally chartered railroad construed in Bankers Trust Co. v. Texas & Pacific R. Co., 241 U. S. 295 (1916), in neither of which cases did we find a grant of federal jurisdiction. The Court of Appeals distinguished Osborn v. Bank of United States, 9 Wheat. 738 (1824), where we reached the opposite result under the charter of the second Bank of the United States, the Court of Appeals finding it significant that the second Bank's authorization to sue and be sued spoke of a particular federal court and of state courts already possessed
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