Court Opinion

ID: 9469603
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:45:03.623201+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:28.515211
License: Public Domain

JAMES E. DOYLE, Senior District Judge,
dissenting.
I.
The key to today’s decision is the view that “a grand waste of efforts by both the courts and parties in litigating the same issues regarding the same contract in two forums at once” is intolerable. Sympathetic vibrations stir in judicial breasts. Each state and federal judge lives with the tension between quantity and quality. It is desirable that in any one dispute, the need to resolve this tension be visited upon but one trial judge. When disputants make demand upon two trial courts to decide a single case, logic surely suggests that the phenomenon be met with some device to eliminate one of the trial courts from the field. Within the court system of each state government and within the court system of the national government, such devices have been developed.
Not sterile logic, however, but about 375 years of history have shaped the relationship between the courts of the states and the courts of the United States. When Congress established the United States trial courts and whenever it then conferred nonexclusive subject matter jurisdiction upon them, particularly diversity jurisdiction (in 1789), it created a potential for simultaneous resort to state and federal courts by parties to a single dispute. Conceivably, either Congress or the Supreme Court of the United States might have decided that whenever this phenomenon occurs, the national trial courts should defer to the state trial courts. Not at all. In general terms, the Supreme Court pronounced early what it has recently described as “the virtually unflagging obligation of the federal courts to exercise the jurisdiction given them.” Colorado River Water Cons. Dist. v. United *539States, 424 U.S. 800, 817, 96 S.Ct. 1236, 1246, 47 L.Ed.2d 483 (1976). In more specific terms, the Court adopted the rule that “the pendency of an action in the state court is no bar to proceedings concerning the same matter in the Federal court having jurisdiction.” McClellan v. Carland, 217 U.S. 268, 282, 30 S.Ct. 501, 504, 54 L.Ed. 762 (1910). The values served by the creation and exercise of jurisdiction in the national courts were thought so significant as to render tolerable, not intolerable, the occasional waste of judicial resources arising from duplication of effort.
But, of course, there is- more to the story. It has been impossible to ignore the practical problem of such waste, however infrequent. In Brillhart v. Excess Ins. Co., 316 U.S. 491, 62 S.Ct. 1173, 86 L.Ed. 1620 (1942), the Court upheld a federal- district court’s dismissal of a diversity suit for a declaratory judgment because of the pendency in a state court of a suit between the same parties and involving the same subject matter. The “virtually” unflagging duty to exercise jurisdiction was revealed as less than absolute. The district court was “under no compulsion to exercise that jurisdiction.” Id. at 494, 62 S.Ct. at 1175. In Colorado River Water Cons. Dist. v. United States, in which the “virtually unflagging duty” was so heavily underscored, it was held that the circumstances there present were sufficiently special to permit affirmance of a federal district court’s discretionary choice to dismiss an action in deference to related state court litigation. And in Will v. Calvert Fire Ins. Co., 437 U.S. 655, 98 S.Ct. 2552, 57 L.Ed.2d 504 (1978), it was held on a petition for mandamus that the right of the plaintiff in a federal court action to an adjudication in that forum, without regard to the concurrent state court proceedings, was not so “clear and indisputable” as to require the appellate court to limit the district court’s range of discretion and to command it to proceed to that adjudication on the merits. Id., at 662, 98 S.Ct. at 2557.
The division within the Court in Will v. Calvert Fire Ins. Co. was such that the rule of Colorado River Cons. Dist. remains in full force: only in exceptional circumstances is a federal district court free to stay an action because the same dispute is the subject of a state court proceeding (although the circumstances need not be quite so exceptional as the dissenters in Calvert Fire Ins. Co. would prefer). See 17 Wright, Miller, And Cooper, Federal Practice And Procedure § 4247 (1978 & Supp.1982); 1A Moore’s Federal Practice § 0.203[4] (2d ed. 1982 & Supp.1982).
Today’s decision in this court turns on its head this thread of history and controlling authority. Had the district court here granted defendant Ontel’s motion to stay, we might now be engaged in deciding whether the circumstances are sufficiently exceptional, as compared with those present in Colorado River Cons. Dist., to free the district court to take this rather bold step. But this district court denied the stay. So the question is whether the district court was free to exercise its discretion in a conservative manner, to move in the mainstream, obedient to its virtually unflagging obligation to exercise its jurisdiction. The most recent utterance of the Supreme Court is “that a district court should exercise its discretion with [its virtually unflagging obligation to exercise its jurisdiction] in mind, but . . . that the decision whether to defer to the concurrent jurisdiction of a state court is, in the last analysis, a matter committed to the district court’s discretion.” Will v. Calvert Fire Ins. Co., supra, 437 U.S. at 664, 98 S.Ct. at 2558.
The enterprise to which appellant Ontel bids us is radical. Describing this as a case of first impression here, the majority puts the question as “whether a district court is ever required to stay its proceedings pending the resolution of identical proceedings in a state court.” (Emphasis added.) To answer yes is to effect a substantive change in the distribution of power between the national court system and the court systems of the states. If it were necessary to give answer today, mine would be no. But it is not necessary. The circumstances of some future case may be so truly exceptional— yet more truly exceptional than those *540present in Brillhart, Colorado River, and Will v. Calvert — as to compel an answer. In the case before us, the time for removal in New York had passed, the federal court plaintiff is the defendant (not the plaintiff) in the earlier-filed state court action; the state within which the particular federal district court sits is the state of which plaintiff is a citizen; there is no clear balance of convenience; and both the law of New York and the law of Illinois appear to be implicated. A number of meritorious considerations favor the New York state court as the forum, to be sure, perhaps enough to have persuaded the federal district court to test its tenuous freedom to refrain from exercising its jurisdiction. But this distinctly unexceptional case fails miserably as the occasion for the pronouncement of a new limitation upon the power of the national courts.
II.
It is the concern expressed in part I which prompts this dissent. However, even in the absence of a curtailment of federal jurisdiction, acquiescence in this appellate intrusion would be difficult. For example, even if the facts were about as they are but two federal district courts were involved and we were reviewing an exercise of discretion without jurisdictional implications, appellate restraint would be the wiser course.1 Neither fundamental rights nor an interpretation of constitutional or statutory language would be involved. The waste found intolerable in the majority opinion is the kind of practical problem better left to the district courts. A measure of serenity in the face of occasional gaffes by district judges is in order as contrasted with involvement of courts of appeals in weighing assortments of strictly prudential factors. It is neither desirable nor possible to formulate a balancing rule for every contingency which may arise in efforts to conserve judicial resources.
III.
All this assumes that appellate jurisdiction is present under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(a)(1). On this point, the majority opinion confronts with admirable forthrightness the many obstacles to its assertion of jurisdiction. This forthrightness falters in three respects.
A. “When the [‘Enelow-Ettelson’] rule is stated in its most general form,” the majority acknowledges, one of its forks is that the stay must have been sought to enable the prior determination of an equitable defense. Lee v. Ply*Gem Industries, Inc., 593 F.2d 1266, 1268 (D.C.Cir.1979), cert. denied, 441 U.S. 967, 99 S.Ct. 2417, 60 L.Ed.2d 1073 (1979). Appearing to accept this most general form of the rule, the majority decides that its requirements have been met and that the stay was indeed sought here to enable such a prior determination. Appellant Ontel has expressly disowned the contention that the requirements of the Enelow-Ettelson rule have been met. Ontel seeks a stay not to engage in arbitration or to obtain a ruling from an administrative agency or for any comparable purpose, but simply to proceed to judgment in its conventional lawsuit in a New York state court for money due on a contract. It is true that the decision whether to grant a stay is itself an exercise in equity, but in this case Ontel claims no equitable defense the determination of which would be rendered possible by a stay.
B. In the course of its invocation of practical reasons, the majority estimates that in the absence of a stay “the unjustified waste could be tremendous and certainly more than offsets the inconveniences of allowing an interlocutory appeal.” Viewed solely within the confines of this very case, a successful interlocutory appeal may result in the expenditure of less federal judicial time in total than that which would be expended in the absence of a stay, although this is by no means clear in light of the uncertain duration of any specific civil suit.
*541The point is, however, that the question cannot be viewed solely within the confines of a single case in which an appellate court decides that a district court did err in denying a stay and then proceeds to order a stay. Unless we assume that district courts will err, and err clearly, more often than not when they deny stays, the aggregate effect of interlocutory appeals over the years will be to increase in some degree the demands upon federal appellate judicial resources and to decrease in some lesser degree the demands upon federal trial court resources.
C. A practical consideration raised by the majority is the need to eliminate, or at least to diminish, what is described as considerable disagreement and confusion among the district courts in the circuit regarding when they should grant stays in deference to state court proceedings. Enjoyment of discretion is enjoyment of choice. It is inherent in the enjoyment of choice by district courts that in a batch of virtually identical cases, except for the identities of the parties and the particular times and places in question, some district courts will proceed to consider all the appropriate factors and then grant stays while others will proceed to consider all the appropriate factors (as the majority agrees the district court did here) and then deny stays. Whether toleration of such disparate results is a badge of vice or virtue in a judicial system depends upon the proper application of the principle of division of labor. Some subjects are better left to trial courts, some are not. On balance, I would conclude that the denial of stays in these situations is an administrative, managerial matter better left to trial courts. I would construe § 1292(a)(1) not to grant the right of appeal from a denial of a stay when the stay is sought because of the pendency of similar proceedings in a state court.

. A flat, universal rule within the federal court system — such as automatic deference to the court in which the action was commenced the earlier — would do the trick, but probably too crudely.