Source: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/255/72/
Timestamp: 2019-06-16 04:33:30
Document Index: 298568676

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 1', '§ 2', '§ 128', '§ 3', '§ 244', '§ 128', '§ 244']

Banco Popular v. Wilcox :: 255 U.S. 72 (1921) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center
Justia › US Law › US Case Law › US Supreme Court › Volume 255 › Banco Popular v. Wilcox
Appeal to review 255 F. 442 dismissed for want of jurisdiction.
This was an appeal from a decree of the Circuit Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversing a decision of the United States District Court for Porto Rico which required the appellee to pay the appellant $9,631.92, the amount due on certain mortgages of real estate in Porto Rico, the unpaid principal of which amounted to $6,300.00, and, in default of such payment, directed a foreclosure. The plaintiff bank was a Porto Rico corporation and the defendant a citizen of the United States.
Upon a reversal of the decree in that court, the bank brought this appeal, and, upon a motion to dismiss for want of jurisdiction, we are required to determine its right to do so. The appellant, not denying that the jurisdiction of this Court to review judgments or decrees of the district court for Porto Rico in cases such as the present one was taken away by the act conferring upon the Circuit Court of Appeals of the First Circuit appellate power over that subject (Act Jan. 28, 1915, c. 22, § 1; id., § 2, amending §§ 128 and 238 Judicial Code; id., § 3, repealing § 244, Judicial Code; 38 Stat. 803, 804), nevertheless insists that, by virtue of the jurisdiction of this Court to review judgments and decrees of the circuit courts of appeals, the power taken away is in substance preserved if only successive appeals be resorted to. This rests upon the proposition that, as the act transferring the jurisdiction from this to the circuit court of appeals brought this case within the jurisdiction of the latter court, it hence subjected the decree in this case to the test of finality and the right of review provided in § 128 of the Judicial Code controlling those subjects. While, if the section be considered superficially, the argument is plausible, its unsoundness becomes apparent by the briefest examination of the context and genesis of the section. Virtually every word of the section relied upon to establish that the decree was not final and to justify the asserted right to review it in this Court depends upon limitations expressed in the Judiciary Act of 1891, and which were intended to carry out the great purposes of that act, to distribute the appellate power of the courts of the United States in the proper sense, and were therefore inapplicable to the Porto Rican court. To illustrate, one of the broad distinctions made in the distribution of appellate power under the Act of 1891 depended upon whether the jurisdiction of the federal court as fixed by law was exclusively called into play because of diverse
The act of Congress by which jurisdiction was conferred upon the Circuit Court of Appeals for the First Circuit additionally makes clear the misconception upon which the argument rests. At the time that act was passed, the jurisdiction of this Court to review the Porto Rican court embraced two classes of cases, the one involving enumerated federal questions in the true sense, and the other where the power depended upon the amount involved. § 244, Jud. Code. But the transferring act did not divest this Court of appellate jurisdiction over the Porto Rican court, but, on the contrary, preserved its authority, although, in some respects limiting and in others enlarging it, and transferred to the circuit courts of appeals appellate jurisdiction in all cases other than those in which jurisdiction by direct appeal was conferred upon this Court, unless otherwise provided by law -- a result which clearly negates that it was contemplated that a right to successive appeals should exist, and which, moreover, indisputably shows that it was the purpose of Congress not to give the circuit court of appeals an authority which it could not exert compatibly with the distribution of federal appellate judicial power made by the Act of 1891.
255 U.S. 72