Court Opinion

ID: 9420152
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:53:09.889137+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:22.786874
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring.
I deem it appropriate to state why I concur merely in the Court’s result.
The only question in this case is whether Scophony Limited, a British corporation, which has its offices and principal place of business in London, may be made a party defendant in a suit by the United States for violation of the Sherman Law pending in the Southern District of New York. The corporation may be brought into court in that District if its activities there satisfy the requirements of § 12 of the Clayton Act. According to *819this provision, Scophony Limited is properly a party defendant in this suit only if, by virtue of its activities, it is “found or transacts business” in the Southern District of New York, and it may be served in that District if it is “found” there.
Whether a corporation “transacts business” in a particular district is a question of fact in its ordinary un-technical meaning. The answer turns on an appraisal of the unique circumstances of a particular situation. And a corporation can be “found” anywhere, whenever the needs of law make it appropriate to attribute location to a corporation, only if activities on its behalf that are more than episodic are carried on by its agents in a particular place. This again presents a question of fact turning on the unique circumstances of a particular situation, to be ascertained as such questions of fact are every day decided by judges.
What was done in the Southern District of New York on behalf of Scophony Limited, as detailed in the Court’s opinion, establishes that the corporation was there transacting business and was found there in the only sense in which a corporation ever “transacts business” or is “found.” Accordingly, Scophony Limited was amenable to suit and service in the District within the requirements of § 12 of the Clayton Act.
To reach this result, however, I do not find it necessary to open up difficult and subtle problems regarding the law’s attitude toward corporations. I abstain from joining the Court’s opinion not because I am in disagreement with what is said but because I am not prepared to agree. And I am not prepared to agree because I do not wish to forecast, which agreement would entail, the bearing of the Court’s discussion upon situations not now before us but as to which such theoretical discussion is bound to be influential. Law, no doubt, is concerned with “practical and substantial rights, not to maintain theories.” *820Davis v. Mills, 194 U. S. 451, 457. But theories often determine rights. Since I do not know where the opinion in this case will take me in the future, I prefer to reach its destination by the much shorter route of recognizing that a corporation as such never transacts business and is never found anywhere, but does “transact business” and is “found” somewhere by attribution to the corporation of what human beings do for it. No doubt legal reasoning-must be on its guard not to oversimplify. Dangers also lurk in overcomplicating.
From earliest times the law has enforced rights and exacted liabilities by utilizing a corporate concept — by recognizing, that is, juristic persons other than human beings. The theories by which this mode of legal operation has developed, has been justified, qualified, and defined are the subject-matter of a very sizable library. The historic roots of a particular society, economic pressures, philosophic notions, all have had their share in the law’s response to the ways of men in carrying on their affairs through what is now the familiar device of the corporation. Law has also responded to religious needs in recognizing juristic persons other than human beings. Thus, in the Hindu law an idol has standing in court to enforce its rights. See, e. g., Pramatha Nath Mullick v. Pradyumna Kumar Mullick, 52 L. R. I. A. 245 (1925). Attribution of legal rights and duties to a juristic person other than man is necessarily a metaphorical process. And none the worse for it. No doubt, “metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched,” Cardozo, J., in Berkey v. Third Avenue R. Co., 244 N. Y. 84, 94. But all instruments of thought should be narrowly watched lest they be abused and fail in their service to reason.