Cite as: 519 U. S. 61 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
We concluded that, "whether or not the case was properly removed, the District Court did have jurisdiction of the parties at the time it entered judgment." Id., at 700. "Under such circumstances," we held, "the validity of the removal procedure followed may not be raised for the first time on appeal." Ibid. (emphasis added). Grubbs instructs that an erroneous removal need not cause the destruction of a final judgment, if the requirements of federal subject-matter jurisdiction are met at the time the judgment is entered. Grubbs, however, dealt with a case removed without objection. The decision is not dispositive of the question whether a plaintiff, who timely objects to removal, may later successfully challenge an adverse judgment on the ground that the removal did not comply with statutory prescriptions.
Beyond question, as Lewis acknowledges, there was in this case complete diversity, and therefore federal subject-matter jurisdiction, at the time of trial and judgment. See Brief for Respondent 18-19 (diversity became complete "when Liberty Mutual settled its subrogation claim with Whayne Supply and the latter was formally dismissed from the case"). The case had by then become, essentially, a two-party lawsuit: Lewis, a citizen of Kentucky, was the sole plaintiff; Caterpillar, incorporated in Delaware with its principal place of business in Illinois, was the sole defendant Lewis confronted. Caterpillar maintains that this change cured the threshold statutory misstep, i. e., the removal of a case when diversity was incomplete. Brief for Petitioner 7, 13.
Caterpillar moves too quickly over the terrain we must cover. The jurisdictional defect was cured, i. e., complete diversity was established before the trial commenced. Therefore, the Sixth Circuit erred in resting its decision on the absence of subject-matter jurisdiction. But a statutory flaw—Caterpillar's failure to meet the § 1441(a) requirement that the case be fit for federal adjudication at the time the removal petition is filed—remained in the unerasable history of the case.
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