Frederick Pina v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company

I. Whether the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment—as construed in Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Dep’t of Environmental Protection, 560 U.S. 702 (2010), and Sheetz v. County of El Dorado, 601 U.S. 267 (2024)—forbids federal courts from issuing judicial decrees that extinguish a litigant’s vested procedural default rights under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 81(c)(2)(C) and 55(a), without prior notice and without affording an opportunity to be heard, where the opposing party concededly never filed a responsive pleading within the mandatory statutory deadline. II. Whether the Second Circuit’s affirmance—which treated a pre-motion conference letter that the Clerk of the Eastern District of New York expressly rejected as “not a motion” as sufficient to defeat Petitioner’s default entitlements—is irreconcilable with that same Court’s holding in Kowalchuck v. Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 94 F.4th 210 (2d Cir. 2024), thereby creating an intra-circuit conflict of constitutional dimension that only this Court can resolve.