John HR Doe and six other plaintiffs (Does) allege that William Babcock, a counselor at Kynoch Elementary School, sexually assaulted them between 1993 and 2001, including during counseling sessions, while the school operated within Marysville Joint Unified School District (the District). Before filing the lawsuit at issue here, Does twice filed and then voluntarily dismissed nearly identical claims against the District and Babcock. The first two rounds were filed in Yuba County Superior Court in 2020 and voluntarily dismissed without prejudice that November. The same day, Does filed a new action in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California realleging their state-law claims and adding federal claims under Title IX, 42 U.S.C. section 1983, and the No Child Left Behind Act. After the District moved to dismiss on Eleventh Amendment sovereign-immunity and other grounds, Does voluntarily dismissed the federal action “without prejudice” under rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Weeks later, Does filed the present action in state court (later transferred to Yuba County), alleging only state-law tort claims arising from the same abuse.

The District demurred, arguing that Does’ claims were barred by claim preclusion under the so-called “two-dismissal rule” of rule 41(a)(1)(B), which provides that a second voluntary dismissal of an action based on the same claim “operates as an adjudication on the merits.” Because Does had already dismissed the same claims twice before — once in state court and once in federal court — the District argued the federal dismissal triggered the rule and barred the state action outright. Does countered that the federal dismissal could not carry claim-preclusive weight because the District’s invocation of Eleventh Amendment immunity had stripped the district court of subject-matter jurisdiction over their state-law claims. The Yuba County Superior Court agreed with the District, ruling that the federal dismissal operated as an adjudication on the merits and sustained the demurrer without leave to amend, entering judgment for the District.

In a split decision, the Court of Appeal affirmed, holding that state courts must apply the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to determine the preclusive effect of a federal voluntary dismissal, and that rule 41(a)(1)(B) rendered the second dismissal claim preclusive as a matter of federal law. (Doe v. Marysville Joint Unified School Dist. (2023) 98 Cal.App.5th 95, 110.) The dissent, following the reasoning of Gray v. La Salle Bank, N.A. (2023) 95 Cal.App.5th 932 — a Sixth District decision issued while the appeal was pending — would have held that state claim-preclusion law, under which a voluntary dismissal without prejudice has no preclusive effect, governed the state-law claims because the federal court’s jurisdiction over them had been supplemental rather than original.

In the case of Doe v. Marysville Joint Unified School District, No. S283639 (Cal. Sup. Ct., July 2026) — the California Supreme Court reversed the judgment of the Court of Appeal and remanded the case for further proceedings.

The Court of Appeal majority had misread Semtek Int’l Inc. v. Lockheed Martin Corp. (2001) 531 U.S. 497, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that both sides treated as controlling. In Semtek, the high court held that rule 41(b)’s phrase “adjudication upon the merits” does not mean a dismissal automatically carries claim-preclusive effect in other courts; it means only that the same claim cannot be refiled in the same court. The Supreme Court explained that treating the rule as a freestanding rule of claim preclusion would be an odd place to bury such a rule, would risk exceeding the Rules Enabling Act’s bar on altering substantive rights, and would produce forum-shopping problems under Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins (1938) 304 U.S. 64. Because rule 41(a)(1)(B) uses the identical “adjudication on the merits” language, the court reasoned, Semtek’s interpretation applies equally: a second voluntary dismissal under the two-dismissal rule bars refiling the same claims in the same federal court, but it does not, by itself, preclude a later suit in a different court — including a state court.

The court rejected the District’s argument that Semtek’s holding was limited to diversity cases and left federal-question dismissals subject to a different rule. It reasoned that Semtek’s interpretation of the rule itself did not turn on the basis for jurisdiction; only the separate question of which body of law’s preclusion rules apply (a uniform federal rule for federal-question cases, versus the forum state’s rule in diversity cases, per Taylor v. Sturgell (2008) 553 U.S. 880) depends on the jurisdictional source. Since rule 41(a)(1)(B) is not itself a rule of claim preclusion under either body of law, the court found it unnecessary to decide which preclusion rule would apply to Does’ state-law claims, because the outcome was the same either way: California law does not treat a voluntary dismissal without prejudice as a judgment on the merits, and no persuasive authority establishes that federal common law treats a two-dismissal-rule dismissal as barring a subsequent state-court suit on state-law claims. The court found support in Gray v. La Salle Bank, N.A., which had reached the same conclusion on similar facts, and distinguished the out-of-circuit authority the District cited as either predating Semtek or addressing a different question — whether two suits raised the “same claim” for purposes of applying the rule within the federal courts, not whether the rule itself extends preclusive force into state court.

The court added that even if the federal dismissal were treated as a final adjudication of Does’ federal claims, there would be no basis to extend that finality to the supplemental state-law claims, since federal courts routinely allow such claims to be refiled in state court after a discretionary dismissal without prejudice, and there is no comparable federal interest in barring purely state-law claims from state court. Having resolved the case on this ground, the court declined to reach Does’ alternative argument that the District’s invocation of sovereign immunity in the federal action deprived that court of subject-matter jurisdiction over the state-law claims in the first place.