Opinion ID: 1476448
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 19

Heading: Delaware's Concurrent Jurisdiction Over The Plaintiffs' Transitory Causes of Action

Text: Our conclusion does not rest solely upon Pan American's failure to carry its burden, however. The facts of record in this case, and the rules of law applicable thereto, affirmatively establish that Candlewood's claims against Pan American are transitory. By definition a transitory claim is one that can be brought in the jurisdiction where a defendant resides, in this case, Delaware. As stated in Professor Moore's treatise, [an] action is transitory, even though it may affect land, if the type of relief requested is personal in nature so that the court acts on the defendant's person or personal property, which is within its control, and not directly on the lands involved. . . . [M]ost types of actions are considered transitory even though the outcome of the litigation may affect property. [52] Consistent with that fundamental principle is the uncontroverted opinion testimony of Arthur Taylor Von Mehren, Story Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School. Professor Von Mehren states that the contract and tort claims pled by the plaintiffs are today considered transitory in nature, [53] and that [n]o contemporary legal order's law of contract or tort seeks to localize in principle actions sounding in tort or contract. [54] Pan American does not straightforwardly confront this issue or address that analysis. Instead, it contends that this dispute is akin to that involved in Taylor v. LSI Logic Corp., where this Court held that a Canadian statute (Section 241 of the Canada Business Corporations Act) which provided an oppression remedy for minority stockholders and authorized suit only in specified Canadian courts, deprived the Delaware courts of subject matter jurisdiction to grant the requested equitable relief that the plaintiff was seeking under that statute. [55] We disagree. Taylor undercuts Pan American's case rather than supports it. Taylor is properly analyzed within the framework of the general rule that was first articulated in 1914 in Tennessee Coal, Iron & R.R. Co. v. George. [56] The issue in Tennessee Coal was whether an injured employee could bring suit against his employer in Georgia, under an Alabama statute that created tort liability for an employer if the employee suffered injury due to defective machinery. The Alabama statute also provided that relief under the statute could only be sought in an Alabama court. The United States Supreme Court held that the employee could bring suit under the statute in Georgia, because the place of bringing the suit is not part of the cause of actionthe right and remedy are not so inseparably united as to make the right dependent upon its being enforced in a particular tribunal. [57] Observing that for various practical reasons a plaintiff might want to bring suit in a state other than where the injury was inflicted, the Court held that: [A] state cannot create a transitory cause of action and at the same time destroy the right to sue on that transitory cause of action in any court having jurisdiction. That jurisdiction is to be determined by the law of the court's creation and cannot be defeated by the extraterritorial operation of a statute of another State, even though it created the right of action. [58] In Taylor this Court found that the general rule of Tennessee Coal did not apply, because the oppression remedy in Section 241 [was] purely a legislatively created statutory remedy, [59] and it was the intent of the [Canadian] Parliament that actions brought under Section 241 of the Canada Business Corporations Act be brought only in the courts of Canada identified in Section 2 of the Canadian Act. [60] That is, in Taylor, the right and the remedy were found to be so inseparably intertwined that equitable relief under the statute could only be obtained from one of the specific Canadian tribunals mandated in the statute. That is not the case here. This case requires the application of the general rule of Tennessee Coal rather than the analysis applied in Taylor. Here, unlike Taylor (or, for that matter, unlike Tennessee Coal ), the plaintiffs here are asserting claims arising under common law, not under an Argentine statute that purports to localize those claims exclusively within the Argentine court system. Moreover, here the plaintiffs' causes of action are not (as was found to be the case in Taylor ) so inseparably intertwined with a statutorily-created remedy that the right can be enforced only in the statutorily-mandated tribunal. This case is more akin to Randall v. Arabian American Oil Co., [61] where the plaintiff brought a claim in the United States District Court for wrongful discharge from his employment with a Saudi Arabian oil company. Rejecting the argument that the Saudi Arabian Labor Law vested exclusive jurisdiction over such claims in the Saudi Arabian courts, the Fifth Circuit described the claim as a classic example of a transitory cause of action that may be enforced in any foreign court having subject matter and in personam jurisdiction, and it held that: It stands to reason that if the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the United States Constitution, which is the Supreme Law of the land, does not compel one state from recognizing the exclusive jurisdiction provisions of a sister state, then we see little or no reason why in a transnational case, such as this, where no higher positive law binds us, we should be compelled to give effect to a foreign state's exclusive jurisdiction provision. [62] For these reasons, we conclude that the claims being asserted here, although not sufficient to confer equitable jurisdiction, are by their nature transitory, and therefore are properly brought in the Superior Court of the State of Delaware.