Court Opinion

ID: 9429934
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:28:20.988811+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:22.112086
License: Public Domain

Chief Justice Burger,
concurring in the judgment.
I agree with the Court’s implicit conclusion that the Court of Appeals approached 28 U. S. C. § 1738 too narrowly and technically by holding it irrelevant on the ground that Illinois law does not address the preclusive effect of a state court judgment on a federal antitrust suit, see 726 F. 2d 1150, 1154 (1984). In the circumstances presented by this case, a fair reading of § 1738 requires federal courts to look first to general principles of state preclusion law. Those principles control if they clearly establish that the state court judgment does not bar the later federal action: Only recently, we re*388affirmed in Migra v. Warren City School District Board of Education, 465 U. S. 75 (1984), that a federal court is not free to accord greater preclusive effect to a state court judgment than the state courts themselves would give to it.
The Court now remands with directions for the District Court to consider Illinois claim preclusion law, but no guidance is given as to how the District Court should proceed if it finds state law silent or indeterminate on the claim preclusion question. The Court’s refusal to acknowledge this potential problem appears to stem from a belief that the jurisdictional competency requirement of res judicata doctrine will dispose of most cases like this. See ante, at 882.
I cannot agree with the Court’s interpretation of the jurisdictional competency requirement. If state law provides a cause of action that is virtually identical with a federal statutory cause of action, a plaintiff suing in state court is able to rely on the same theory of the case and obtain the same remedy as would be available in federal court, even when the plaintiff cannot expressly invoke the federal statute because it is within the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal courts. In this situation, the jurisdictional competency requirement is effectively satisfied. Therefore, the fact that state law recognizes the jurisdictional competency requirement does not necessarily imply that a state court judgment has no claim preclusive effect on a cause of action within exclusive federal jurisdiction.
The states that recognize the jurisdictional competency requirement do not all define it in the same terms. Illinois courts have expressed the doctrine in the following manner: “The principle [of res judicata] extends not only to questions which were actually litigated but also to all questions which could have been raised or determined.” Spiller v. Continental Tube Co., 95 Ill. 2d 423, 432, 447 N. E. 2d 834, 838 (1983) (emphasis added); see also, e. g., LaSalle National Bank v. County Board of School Trustees, 61 Ill. 2d 524, 529, 337 N. E. 2d 19, 22 (1975); People v. Kidd, 398 Ill. 405, 408, 75 N. E. 2d 851, 853-854 (1947). In the present case, each *389petitioner could have alleged a cause of action under the Illinois Antitrust Act, Ill. Rev. Stat., ch. 38, ¶60 — 1 et seq. (1981), in his prior state court lawsuit against respondent. The principles of Illinois res judicata doctrine appear to be indeterminate as to whether petitioners’ ability to raise state antitrust claims in their prior state court suits should preclude their assertion of essentially the same claims in the present federal action. This indeterminacy arises from the fact that the Illinois courts have not addressed whether the notion of “questions which could have been raised” should be applied narrowly1 or broadly.2 No Illinois court has considered how the jurisdictional competency requirement should apply in the type of situation presented by this case, where the same theory of recovery may be asserted under different statutes. Nor has any Illinois court considered whether res judicata precludes splitting a cause of action between a court of limited jurisdiction and one of general jurisdiction.3
*390Hence it is likely that the principles of Illinois claim preclusion law do not speak to the preclusive effect that petitioners’ state court judgments should have on the present action. In this situation, it may be consistent with § 1738 for a federal court to formulate a federal rule to resolve the matter. If state law is simply indeterminate, the concerns of comity and federalism underlying § 1738 do not come into play. At the same time, the federal courts have direct interests in ensuring that their resources are used efficiently and not as a means of harassing defendants with repetitive lawsuits, as well as in ensuring that parties asserting federal rights have an adequate opportunity to litigate those rights. Given the insubstantiality of the state interests and the weight of the federal interests, a strong argument could be made that a federal rule would be more appropriate than a creative interpretation of ambiguous state law.4 When state law is indeterminate or ambiguous, a clear federal rule would promote substantive interests as well: “Uncertainty intrinsically works to defeat the opportunities for repose and reliance sought by the rules of preclusion, and confounds the desire for efficiency by inviting repetitious litigation to test the pre-clusive effects of the first effort.” 18 C. Wright, A. Miller, & E. Cooper, supra n. 3, §4407, at 49.
A federal rule, might be fashioned from the test, which this Court has applied in other contexts, that a party is precluded *391from asserting a claim that he had a “full and fair opportunity” to litigate in a prior action. See, e. g., Kremer v. Chemical Construction Corp., 456 U. S. 461, 485 (1982); Allen v. McCurry, 449 U. S. 90, 95 (1980); Montana v. United States, 440 U. S. 147, 153 (1979); Blonder-Tongue Laboratories, Inc. v. University of Illinois Foundation, 402 U. S. 313, 328 (1971). Thus, if a state statute is identical in all material respects with a federal statute within exclusive federal jurisdiction, a party’s ability to assert a claim under the state statute in a prior state court action might be said to have provided, in effect^ a “full and fair opportunity” to litigate his rights under the federal statute. Cf. Derish v. San Mateo-Burlingame Board of Realtors, 724 F. 2d 1347 (CA9 1983); Nash County Board of Education v. Biltmore Co., 640 F. 2d 484 (CA4), cert. denied, 454 U. S. 878 (1981).
The Court will eventually have to face these questions; I would resolve them now.

 E. g., by inquiring whether the plaintiff could have raised the question whether the defendant violated a particular statute.

 E. g., by inquiring whether the plaintiff could have raised the question whether the defendant engaged in a group boycott.

 Compare Restatement (Second) of Judgments § 24, Comment g, Illustration 14, pp. 204-205 (1982):
“In an automobile collision, A is injured and his car damaged as a result of the negligence of B. Instead of suing in a court of general jurisdiction of the state, A brings his action for the damage to his car in a justice’s court, which has jurisdiction in actions for damage to property but has no jurisdiction in actions for injury to the person. Judgment is rendered for A for the damage to the ear. A cannot thereafter maintain an action against B to recover for the injury to his person arising out of the same collision.” See also 18 C. Wright, A. Miller, & E. Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure § 4412, p. 95 (1981), stating that the “general rule” in state courts is that “[a] second action will not be permitted on parts of a single claim that could have been asserted in a court of broader jurisdiction simply because the plaintiff went first to a court of limited jurisdiction in the same state that could not hear them.” The holding in Lucas v. Le Compte, 42 Ill. 303 (1866), is similar to this “general rule,” but that holding was based on a construction of an Illinois statute, Ill. Rev. Stat., ch. 59, §35 (1845), which (a) has been repealed, see Act of Apr. 15, 1965, 1965 Ill. Laws 331, and (b) *390had a broader preclusive effect than general Illinois res judicata doctrine has. Clancey v. McBride, 338 Ill. 35, 169 N. E. 729 (1929), involved the same circumstances as the above-quoted illustration from the Restatement. The court resolved the case, however, without reference to the limited jurisdiction of the justice’s court, by concluding that injury to the person and injury to property are distinct legal wrongs that can be the subject of separate lawsuits.

 By contrast, when a federal court construes substantive rights and obligations under state law in the context of a diversity action, the federal interest is insignificant and the state’s interest is much more direct than it is in the present situation, even if the relevant state law is ambiguous.