Opinion ID: 179728
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Jensen Connection

Text: The district court rejected the contention that the Second International Council and Bahá'í Publishers were in privity with the Hereditary Guardianship through Jensen. After declining to apply Merriam, the judge explicitly entered an alternative holding that Jensen was not legally identified with the Hereditary Guardianship even if Merriam applied. The judge acknowledged that Jensen was an incorporator of the Hereditary Guardianship, that he served as one of its first board members, and that contemporaneous evidence suggested that Jensen remained a follower of the Hereditary Guardianship during the underlying litigation. Nevertheless, the court found that Jensen disassociated himself from any governing role in the organization shortly after serving his one-year term on the board. This was well before the underlying injunction was issued. The National Spiritual Assembly disputes these findings. It argues that Jensen's extensive involvement with the Hereditary Guardianship prior to the underlying litigation establishes legal identity. We see no clear error in the district court's findings, which were amply supported by the record. Jensen's term on the Hereditary Guardianship board ended in the middle of 1964; he was not reelected as a board member. After he lost reelection, he did not serve in a governance, advisory, or any other controlling position in the Hereditary Guardianship, and he had no involvement in the underlying litigation. As such, Jensen did not occupy the sort of key role in the Hereditary Guardianshipeither generally or with respect to injunction litigationthat could form the basis of a legal identity finding under Merriam. The National Spiritual Assembly argues in the alternative that Jensen (and by extension, the Second International Council and the Bahá'í Publishers) should be bound by the injunction because Jensen remained an adherent and the Hereditary Guardianship adequately represented its believers' interests in the underlying suit against the National Spiritual Assembly. The Supreme Court in Taylor and our own recent decision in Tice recognize that the concept of privity in preclusion doctrine includes a very limited adequate-representation category. See Taylor, 553 U.S. at 894, 128 S.Ct. 2161 (observing that adequate representation by someone with the same interests who [wa]s a party to the earlier suit sufficed for privity purposes in certain limited circumstances, including properly conducted class actions and suits brought by trustees, guardians, and other fiduciaries); Tice, 162 F.3d at 973 ([U]nless a formal kind of successor interest is involved . . ., there should be some indication . . . that the second party either had participated or had a legal duty to participate.); see also RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF JUDGMENTS § 41 (similarly limiting adequate-representation theory of privity). The trademark litigation 44 years ago does not fit into this limited category. A finding of privity based on adequate representation in the circumstances of this case would be entirely unwarranted. The Hereditary Guardianship did not conduct the underlying litigation as anything like a fiduciary for its members, and there is no evidence to suggest it was acting in a representative capacity for its followers personally. To find privity based on adequate representation here would treat every suit by an organization as having res judicata and contempt implications for the organization's members individually. This is contrary to the Supreme Court's language in Taylor carefully limiting the scope of the adequate-representation category of privity. At bottom, this argument is an appeal to the theory of virtual representation, which the Supreme Court has firmly rejected in the field of claim preclusion. Taylor, 553 U.S. at 904, 128 S.Ct. 2161. Having rejected virtual-representation theory in its traditional res judicata setting, we see no reason why the Supreme Court would view it more favorably in the context of injunctions. The district court properly rejected the attempt to bind the Second International Council and Bahá'í Publishers through Jensen.