In Mueller v. Walmart Corp., No. 23-12854 (11th Cir. Sept. 16, 2026), the Eleventh Circuit rejects a per se rule that a district court abuses its discretion by retaining supplemental jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1367(c)(3) over some, but not all, state-law claims after the principal federal law claims are dismissed (after the plaintiff abandoned them).
Plaintiff brought a federal action under 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 and 1982 arising out of detention and arrest on a shoplifting charge (later dropped) that included supplemental claims under Georgia state tort law: negligence, negligent hiring, false arrest, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, assault and battery.
After the plaintiff abandoned the federal claims during briefing of summary judgment, the district court—rather than relinquish supplemental jurisdiction over the state-law claims—granted summary judgment on all except the assault and battery claims, which it dismissed with leave for plaintiff to refile in state court. On appeal, the plaintiff argued that the district court erred as a matter of law by selectively exercising supplemental jurisdiction over some but not all the claims.
The Eleventh Circuit affirms the decision on supplemental jurisdiction.
The panel rejects the plaintiff’s principal argument that it is a per se abuse of discretion to exercise supplemental jurisdiction as to only selected claims.
“We find no basis for so rigid a rule in either statutory text or existing precedent. Quite the opposite. On balance, § 1367’s language seems to contemplate (if not quite expressly authorize) the very claim-by-claim assessment that the district court here made. Our own precedent confirms that district courts enjoy ample leeway to make supplemental-jurisdiction determinations. And our sister circuits that have addressed the issue head on have uniformly held that district courts can act on a claim-by-claim basis.”
“Imposing a rigid rule that requires a district court to deal with state-law claims en masse, as an undifferentiated whole, would scuttle that flexibility. Under an all-or-nothing approach, a district court, having determined that the balance of factors cut one way with respect to some claims and the other way with respect to others, would then have to embark on one of two undesirable courses: either dismiss claims it thinks it should keep or keep claims it thinks it should dismiss. That’s the opposite of the flexibility we have recognized and promised.” The panel notes that the Third, Sixth, and Tenth Circuits have ruled likewise, allowing selective exercise of supplemental jurisdiction.
Besides the per se argument, plaintiff argued that “in the particular circumstances of this case, the district court abused its discretion by exercising jurisdiction over some of his state-law claims but not others.” But the panel holds that “we can’t say that the district court abused its discretion by retaining jurisdiction over three of Mueller’s state-law claims and declining to exercise jurisdiction over the other two. By that point, the district court had reviewed the parties’ papers, and it seems to have had a clear sense of which claims it thought it could easily resolve” while it “declined to decide those it thought it couldn’t.”
In a curious coda, though, the Eleventh Circuit goes on to hold that the district court erred in granting summary judgment on the malicious-prosecution claim (finding a genuine dispute of material fact) and remands that claim to the district court. Yet it offers no instructions about whether the district court should continue to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over that claim. Thus at present, the plaintiff has two claims against the same defendant arising from the same incident that are likely proceeding in two different courts.
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