A reopened case, and a motion to declare a litigant vexatious (October 23, 2026)

A docket pass six days after the last one found no lawsuit this tracker does not already hold, and three cases that had moved. One of them had moved two months ago in a direction this record had not registered.

The California action over eye surgery by Mehryar Ray Taban, MD was recorded here as closed, on a summary judgment entered Aug. 7, 2026 that dismissed the case temporarily and would have become permanent if expert disclosures were not served within sixty days. That is not what happened. Ten days later, on Aug. 17, 2026, the court vacated that part of its own order without being asked to and reopened the case, holding that it had erred in trying to impose a probationary period by issuing judgment 'without prejudice'. The order is a text-only docket entry, which means the words on the docket are the order itself rather than a summary of a document filed elsewhere. The rest of the August 7 rulings survived: expert testimony stayed excluded, the request to disqualify the judge stayed denied, and the court's view that the claim cannot be proved without a medical expert was expressly left unchanged. In place of the sixty-day period the court set a date, Sept. 6, 2026, and said summary judgment would issue if it passed without disclosures. Whether it did is not known: the newest entry anyone can reach is a status report filed by the defendant on Sept. 21, 2026, and that document is not published. The practical consequence for this record is that the sixty-day framing, and the October 6 expiry date calculated from it, were withdrawn by the court as a mistake and never governed anything. This site had carried both.

In the federal case against Paul Saladino and Heart & Soil Supplements, a defendant has asked the court to declare the plaintiff a vexatious litigant. The motion was filed Sept. 2, 2026 under the All Writs Act and asks for an order requiring court permission before any further filing against that defendant. It is fully briefed and undecided, and it is the third such motion recorded in this dataset. The motion and the memorandum supporting it were read in full, and their factual assertions are recorded as what they are: claims by a party, not findings by a court. Among them are counts of this litigant's filings - fifty-five federal cases in three years, at least twenty-two similar actions in this one district in two years - which no judge has adopted. The opposition cannot be reported with the same confidence. The plaintiff filed a brief against the motion on Sept. 17, 2026 and attached a second brief to it; both were obtained and both turned out to be scanned images with no readable text, so this record carries that they exist and not what they say. The same reading of that docket recovered three further things it had been missing: a June 25, 2026 recommendation that the case be dismissed for failure to serve the defendants, two motions to dismiss that finished briefing in September, and a reassignment of the case to different judges. None has been decided. This docket's free copy had been frozen at four entries from February; it now runs to twenty-three.

The California action against the law firm that defended the eye-surgery case was dismissed on Oct. 22, 2026 and closed. The dismissal was on the court's own deficiency form and decided nothing about the claims: it issues where a filing problem flagged in a warning letter goes uncorrected for thirty days. Which of the three problems the form lists was the one here cannot be read off the filed copy, and is therefore not stated. Reading that order also corrected the party list. Its caption ends 'et al.' and the court's own record names two defendants where this site named one: the law firm, and Stephen V. Wilson, the district judge who presided over the eye-surgery case. He appears in this record as that case's judge and is now also recorded as a party to this one. Nothing is said about him here beyond that the court lists him as a defendant - the complaint is not published anywhere free and has not been read, so what is alleged against him is not known. On those parties the case has been grouped with the other eye-surgery litigation.

The search for new cases was wide and came back empty, and the empty results are worth as much as the findings. A nationwide federal search for anything filed since Oct. 1 returned four dockets, all four already here. The party index for the Middle District of Pennsylvania returned fifty-five dockets: all fifty-three tracked ones were present and the two extras were collisions already recorded as other people. In Lackawanna County the General Index still lists thirty-nine entries under his own name, the same count as six days earlier, with the company names resolving to matters already on file and no entry at all under any spelling of the Frankie's Free Range Meat trading name - something the index can prove rather than merely fail to find. The county Judgment Index holds one entry under his name, a confession judgment already recorded here in full. New York was searched statewide by filing date under both his own name and a business name, and the method was checked against a case already known to be there before its empty result was believed. Two further name collisions were recorded so they are not investigated again.

One source refused. The Pennsylvania court system's own portal would not accept a connection at all, for the fourth pass running, while other sites answered normally from the same machine. It is the only place that publishes the full text of Pennsylvania appellate orders, so three state appeals could not be checked and their entries are unchanged. That is a gap in what was checked, not a finding that nothing changed, and it is recorded that way.

Smaller corrections: a chronology entry describing the August 7 order as a separate filing made three days after itself has been rewritten; the New York Social Security case gained a notice of appearance filed on the day of this pass; one case's party list could not be confirmed because the only free source hides it, and that is now recorded as unconfirmed rather than left looking checked; and a court document said to list twenty-one of this litigant's other cases has been noted for retrieval before any count from it is repeated here.

Related cases

• 3:25-cv-00011 — Tufano v. Taban et al
• 3:26-cv-00396 — Tufano v. Saladino, MD et al
• 2:26-cv-09565 — Frank Tufano v. Kjar McKenna and Stockalper LLP et al
• 66298/2025 — Frank Tufano v. Social Security Administration et al
• 3:25-cv-00316 — Tufano v. Shopify (USA) Inc. et al
• 3:25-cv-01165 — Tufano v. Fenix Internet LLC

Note

No court has made a vexatious-litigant determination about this litigant, and the motion described above has not been decided. The counts of lawsuits quoted in it were written by a party asking for an order, not by a judge making a finding, and they are reproduced here only as that party's assertion. A dismissal without prejudice, of the kind entered in the California case against the law firm, does not decide whether a claim is right or wrong; it ends that particular case and leaves the claim legally open. Where a document could not be read - because it is a scanned image, or because it is not published free - this record says so rather than describing what it probably says.