Some corners of civil procedure sound like nothing and decide everything. Here’s a fresh one.
If you’re sued in state court, you can usually move the case to federal court. That right is real, and for a big corporate defendant facing a state Attorney General, it can be worth more than most of the arguments in the case. Federal juries come from a wider map. Federal judges are appointed for life. And if you’re the defendant, a state court being asked to void a state easement is the last room in the building you want to be in.
That right comes with a deadline: 30 days. On April 22, 2026, a unanimous Supreme Court held that the deadline means what it says, and that no equitable doctrine will stretch it.
The removal clock lives in 28 U.S.C. § 1446(b)(1):
The notice of removal of a civil action or proceeding shall be filed within 30 days after the receipt by the defendant, through service or otherwise, of a copy of the initial pleading setting forth the claim for relief upon which such action or proceeding is based . . .
Thirty days. From service. That’s the whole rule.
What Enbridge did with its thirty days
Michigan’s Attorney General sued Enbridge in Michigan state court. The State wanted the 1953 easement under the Straits of Mackinac declared void and continued operation of Line 5 declared unlawful. Line 5 is a 645-mile petroleum pipeline; roughly four of those miles run under the Straits.
Enbridge was served in 2019. It litigated in state court. Then, 887 days after it got the complaint, it filed a notice of removal to federal court.
Enbridge didn’t argue it had met the deadline. It argued the deadline should be equitably tolled — that a court, in fairness, could excuse the delay because the grounds for federal jurisdiction had gotten clearer over time and because the district court had at one point kept the case. The Sixth Circuit didn’t buy it and sent the case back to Michigan state court. The Supreme Court affirmed. Justice Sotomayor, writing for a unanimous Court, held that § 1446(b)(1)’s text, structure, and context are inconsistent with equitable tolling. The 30-day window isn’t a default a sympathetic judge can stretch. It’s the rule.
So the case went back to a Michigan state courtroom, roughly seven years after it was filed.
Minnesota is in this case twice
This isn’t a Michigan story with a Minnesota footnote.
Start with the pipe. The Line 3 replacement project put 337 miles of new pipe across northern Minnesota — the biggest single-state segment of a project that laid 13 miles in North Dakota and 14 in Wisconsin. The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission issued the certificate of need and route permit in the fall of 2018, found the revised final environmental impact statement adequate and reissued the permits in 2020, and the replacement line went into service in October 2021. Whatever you think of that project, how a company running that much pipe in this state behaves in court isn’t an abstraction.
Then the brief. Minnesota didn’t just sign on to the amicus brief supporting Michigan — Minnesota led it. The brief filed October 21, 2025 is captioned Brief of Minnesota, et al., with the Office of the Minnesota Attorney General as counsel, joined by Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia.
The states’ interest is simple, and I think they had it exactly right. When a state sues in its own courts to enforce its own property and environmental law, a removal clock that equity can stretch is a clock that never really runs. A defendant could stay in state court as long as things were going well, and remove the minute they weren’t. The Court shut that door.
The part that binds everyone else
Line 5 is the headline. The rule isn’t limited to pipelines, and it isn’t limited to Attorneys General.
If you’re sued in Minnesota state court and you have a basis to be in federal court — diversity of citizenship, a federal question, a federal officer removal theory — the clock starts when you’re served, and after April 22, 2026 there’s no equitable argument waiting at the end of it. Not “we were negotiating.” Not “we did not have counsel yet.” Not “the federal ground did not become obvious until discovery.”
Three practical consequences follow.
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Figure out your forum in the first week, not the first month. Deciding whether to remove takes knowing the parties’ citizenship, the amount in controversy, and whether any defendant is a citizen of the forum state. Thirty days isn’t much time to dig up facts you didn’t gather before you got sued.
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The clock runs from service, not from “when it got to the right person.” Corporate defendants lose removal rights in their own mailrooms. A summons served on a registered agent starts the clock whether or not it reached the general counsel that week.
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Some diversity cases have a second deadline. Separate from the 30-day rule, § 1446(c)(1) bars removal on diversity grounds more than one year after the action commenced — but by its terms that bar applies only to removals under § 1446(b)(3), meaning cases that weren’t removable on the initial pleading and became removable later. It doesn’t reach a case removable on the face of the complaint. The one exception: a district court may excuse it on a finding that the plaintiff acted in bad faith to prevent removal.
And if you’re the plaintiff: if you picked Minnesota state court on purpose, that choice gets a lot sturdier after day 31.
People file deadline cases under “technicalities,” and that’s exactly backwards. A deadline is where the law decides who gets the benefit of delay. Enbridge’s position boiled down to this: a big litigant who waits should get to explain the wait to a judge. The Court’s answer was that Congress already decided how long the wait can be, and a rule everyone can count on beats a rule you argue about in every case. The statute answers the question.
That answer helps a state enforcing its easements. It also helps the small business that gets sued and needs to know, in week one, which courthouse it’ll be defending in — and it binds that business just as tight.
If you’ve been served with a complaint in Minnesota and you’re weighing whether the case belongs in state or federal court, the window is short and it doesn’t reopen. Send us a message or call 612-470-6529.
Sources: Enbridge Energy, LP v. Nessel, 608 U. S. 67 (2026) (Sotomayor, J.), No. 24–783, decided April 22, 2026, affirming 104 F.4th 958 (6th Cir. 2024); 28 U.S.C. § 1446(b)(1), (b)(3), (c)(1); Brief of Minnesota et al. as amici curiae, No. 24–783, filed October 21, 2025 (Office of the Minnesota Attorney General, counsel of record for the amici states); Minnesota Public Utilities Commission Line 3 Replacement Project record, Dockets PL-9/CN-14-916 and PL-9/PPL-15-137 (certificate of need and route permit issued 2018; FEIS found adequate and permits reissued 2020); Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Line 3 project pages (in service October 2021); Minnesota Department of Commerce EERA project docket (route mileage by state). This article is general commentary on a published decision and federal statutes, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Removal analysis depends entirely on the facts of a particular case. No outcome is promised or implied.