Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 91

524US1

Unit: $U73

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UNITED STATES v. BEGGERLY

Opinion of the Court

named several other Missouri citizens as defendants in its
bill seeking relief from the prior judgment.

When the matter reached this Court, we rejected the con-
tention that the federal courts had no jurisdiction over the
bill because the plaintiff and several of the defendants were
from the same State. We ﬁrst noted that there was no ques-
tion as to the court’s jurisdiction over the underlying suit,
and then said:

“On the question of jurisdiction the [subsequent] suit
may be regarded as ancillary to the [prior] suit, so that
the relief asked may be granted by the court which
made the decree in that suit, without regard to the citi-
zenship of the present parties . . . . The bill, though
an original bill in the chancery sense of the word, is a
continuation of the former suit, on the question of the
jurisdiction of the Circuit Court.”

Id., at 522.

Even though there was no diversity, the Court relied on the
underlying suit as the basis for jurisdiction and allowed the
independent action to proceed. The Government is there-
fore wrong to suggest that an independent action brought in
the same court as the original lawsuit requires an independ-
ent basis for jurisdiction.

This is not to say, however, that the requirements for a
If re-
meritorious independent action have been met here.
lief may be obtained through an independent action in a case
such as this, where the most that may be charged against
the Government is a failure to furnish relevant information
that would at best form the basis for a Rule 60(b)(3) motion,
the strict 1-year time limit on such motions would be set at
naught.
Independent actions must, if Rule 60(b) is to be
interpreted as a coherent whole, be reserved for those cases
of “injustices which, in certain instances, are deemed sufﬁ-
ciently gross to demand a departure” from rigid adherence
to the doctrine of res judicata. Hazel-Atlas Glass Co. v.
Hartford-Empire Co., 322 U. S. 238, 244 (1944).