Court Opinion

ID: 9419327
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:48:49.010539+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:17.629339
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
dissenting:
If due regard be had for its aims, the Judiciary Act of 1925, 43 Stat. 936, denies us, in my opinion, the power to review the action in this case of the District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, even though such review is cast in form of a writ of prohibition or of mandamus. But, even assuming we have discretionary power to issue such writs to a district court, we should in the circumstances of this case abstain from exercising that power, in view of the absence of any showing that relief equally prompt and effective and consonant with the national interest was not, and is not, available in the appropriate Circuit Court of Appeals.
The range of cases that may be brought here directly from the district courts and the rigor with which we limit our discretionary jurisdiction determine the capacity of this Court adequately to discharge its essential functions. I shall therefore briefly state the grounds for believing that this case is improperly here, that the rule should be discharged, and the motion for leave to file the petition be denied. I put to one side the relation of the Peruvian Ambassador to this litigation. This is not a proceeding falling under the rubric “Cases affecting Ambassadors” and thereby giving us original jurisdiction. My brethren *591do not so treat it, and our common starting point is that in taking hold of this case the Court is exercising its appellate jurisdiction.
We are also agreed that this Court “can exercise no appellate jurisdiction, except in the cases, and in the manner and form, defined and prescribed by Congress.” American Construction Co. v. Jacksonville, T. & K. W. Ry. Co., 148 U. S. 372, 378. Had this case arisen under the Evarts Act (Act of March 3, 1891, 26 Stat. 826), appeal could have been taken from the district court, since its jurisdiction was in issue, directly to this Court without going to the Circuit Court of Appeals. See, e. g., Wilson v. Republic Iron Co., 257 U. S. 92. And since the case would have been within the immediate appellate jurisdiction of this Court, §§13 and 14 of the first Judiciary Act, 1 Stat. 73, 80-82 (now 28 U. S. C. §§ 342, 377, 451), would have authorized this Court to issue an appropriate writ to prevent frustration of its appellate power, see Ex parte Crane, 5 Pet. 190, or have enabled it to accelerate its own undoubted reviewing authority where, under very exceptional circumstances, actual and not undefined interests of justice so required. Compare In re Chetwood, 165 U. S. 443; Whitney v. Dick, 202 U. S. 132; Adams v. U. S. ex rel. McCann, 317 U. S. 269.
The power to issue these auxiliary writs is not a qualification or even a loose construction of the strict limits, defined by the Constitution and the Congress, within which this Court must move in reviewing decisions of lower courts. There have been occasional, but not many, deviations from the true doctrine in employing these auxiliary writs as incidental to the right granted by Congress to this Court to review litigation, in aid of which it may become necessary to issue a facilitating writ. The issuance of such a writ is, in effect, an anticipatory review of a case that can in due course come here directly. When the Act of 1891 established the intermediate courts of appeals and *592gave to them a considerable part of the appellate jurisdiction formerly exercised by the Supreme Court, the philosophy and practice of federal appellate jurisdiction came under careful scrutiny. This Court uniformly and without dissent held that it was without power to issue a writ of mandamus in a case in which it did not otherwise have appellate jurisdiction. In re Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 482, and In re Glaser, 198 U. S. 171. In these cases, rules were discharged because, under the Circuit Courts of Appeals Act, appeals could not be brought directly to the Supreme Court but would have to go to the Circuit Court of Appeals, and only thereafter could they come here, if at all, through certiorari. But review could be brought directly to this Court of cases in which the jurisdiction of the district court was in issue, and therefore writs of “prohibition or mandamus or certiorari as ancillary thereto,” In re Massachusetts, supra, at 488, were available. Cases which came here directly, prior to the Judiciary Act of February 13, 1925, 43 Stat. 936, to review the jurisdiction of the district courts, whether on appeal or through the informal procedure of auxiliary writs, are therefore not relevant precedents for the present case.
The Judiciary Act of 1925 was aimed to extend the Court’s control over its business by curtailing its appellate jurisdiction drastically. Relief, was given by Congress to enable this Court to discharge its indispensable functions of interpreting the Constitution and preserving uniformity of decision among the eleven intermediate courts of appeals. Periodically since the Civil War— to speak only of recent times — the prodigal scope of the appellate jurisdiction of this Court brought more cases here than even the most competent tribunal could wisely and promptly adjudicate. Arrears became inevitable until, after a long legislative travail, the establishment in 1891 of intermediate appellate tribunals freed this Court of a large volume of business. By 1916, Congress had *593to erect a further dam against access to this Court of litigation that already had been through two lower courts and was not of a nature calling for the judgment of the Supreme Court. Act of September 6, 1916, 39 Stat. 726. But the increase of business — the inevitable aftermath of the Great War and of renewed legislative activity — soon caught up with the meager relief afforded by the Act of 1916. The old evils of an overburdened docket reappeared. Absorption of the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court by cases that should have gone to, or been left with, the circuit courts of appeals resulted in unjustifiable subordination of the national interests in the special keeping of this Court. To be sure, the situation was not as bad as that which called the circuit courts of appeals into being. In the eighties, three to four years elapsed between the docketing and the hearing of a case. But it was bad enough. In 1922, Chief Justice Taft reported to Congress that it took from fifteen to eighteen months for a case to reach argument.
The needless clog on the Court’s proper business came from two sources. More than a dozen classes of cases could have a second review in the Supreme Court, as a matter of right, after an unsuccessful appeal in the circuit courts of appeals. With a single exception, all adjudications by the circuit courts of appeals were by the Act of 1925 made reviewable only by the discretionary writ of certiorari. But no less prolific a source of mischief in the practical application of the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court prior to the Act of 1925, was the right to bring cases directly to this Court from the district courts. According to the figures submitted to Congress in support of the need for the 1925 legislation, one-sixth of the total business of the Supreme Court came directly from the district courts. (Hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Sen*594ate, 68th Cong., 1st Sess., on S. 2060 and S. 2061, pp. 32-33, 44-45.) Most of these cases presented phases of the general question now before us, namely, the right of a district court to adjudicate. The obvious remedy for this unwarranted direct review of courts of first instance was to shut off direct access from the district courts to this Court. That is exactly what was proposed. In the language of the chief spokesman before the judiciary Committees, “Section 238 as amended and reenacted in the bill would permit cases falling within four particular classes, and those only, to come from the district courts directly to the Supreme Court. . . . Apart from cases within these four classes, the bill provides that the immediate review of all decisions in the district courts shall be in the circuit courts of appeals. We regard this as the better course and calculated to promote the public interest.” Ibid., 33-34. This conception of “the public interest” was translated into law, except that in one additional class of cases direct review was allowed from the district courts to this Court. Suffice it to say that the five excepted categories are not in serious derogation of the wise requirement that review of action by the district courts belongs to the circuit courts of appeals. All five either involve litigation before a district court composed of three judges, or ordinarily touch matters of national concern.
The present power of this Court to review directly decisions of district courts must be determined by the restrictions Congress imposed in the Act of 1925. The language of that section is significant:
“A direct review by the Supreme Court of an interlocutory or final judgment or decree of a district court may be had where it is so provided in the following Acts or parts of Acts, and not otherwise. . . .” (43 Stat. 936, 938— italics provided.)
*595This case does not fall even remotely within any of these five Acts.1 We have thus been given no appellate jurisdiction over this controversy, but by resort to so-called ancillary writs we are exercising appellate jurisdiction here. On principle, it is still as true as it was held to be in In re Massachusetts, supra, and In re Glaser, supra, that “in cases over which we possess neither original nor appellate jurisdiction we cannot grant prohibition or mandamus ... as ancillary thereto.” 197 U. S. 482, 488. This *596does not imply that by indirection the Act of 1925 repealed what were originally §§13 and 14 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, on which, in their present form in the United States Code (28 U. S. C. §§ 342, 377, 451), the Court relies. The new distribution of appellate jurisdiction between the Supreme Court and the circuit courts of appeals did not repeal these old provisions. It does, however, call for restriction of their application in harmony with this new distribution. Ancillary writs are still available both for the circuit courts of appeals and this Court when they may in fact be ancillary to a main suit. See Ex parte Kawato, 316 U. S. 650, 317 U. S. 69, 71 (leave to file petition for writ of mandamus granted after such leave was denied by the Circuit Court of Appeals); and Adams v. U. S. ex rel. McCann, 317 U. S. 269. But when we cannot have jurisdiction in a case on appeal, no proceeding can be ancillary to it.
I am not unmindful that the hearings on the Judiciary Act of 1925 before the Committees of Congress are completely silent regarding the appellate jurisdiction of this Court through use of ancillary writs. But it would not be the first time in the history of judiciary legislation that eminent jurisdictional authorities and expert draftsmen, preoccupied with major problems in a large scheme for relieving this Court of undue business, have been forgetful of minor aspects of jurisdiction. For instance, it took six years to deal with the implications overlooked by Senator Evarts in using the phrase “infamous crimes” in the Act of 1891. (See In re Claasen, 140 U. S. 200, and H. Rep. No. 666, 54th Cong., 1st Sess., the letter of Chief Justice Fuller to Senator Hoar in 23 Cong. Rec. 3285-86, Report of Attorney General Olney for 1893, xxv, and the Act of January 20, 1897, 29 Stat. 492.) Legislation by even the most competent hands, like other forms of composition, is subject to the frailties of the imagination. Concentration on the basic aims of a reform like the Act *597of 1925 inevitably overlooks lacunae and ambiguities which the future reveals and which the future must correct. The Act of 1925, despite its deft authorship, soon revealed such ambiguities. See the series of cases collected in Phillips v. United States, 312 U. S. 246, 250-51. They were resolved by faithful enforcement of the central purpose of the Act of February 13, 1925, which was “to keep within narrow confines our appellate docket,” 312 U. S. at 250. For more than half a century the desire of Congress to cut down the appellate jurisdiction of this Court has been given effect in a variety of situations even though Congress did not adequately express such purpose. See, for instance, McLish v. Roff, 141 U. S. 661; Robinson v. Caldwell, 165 U. S. 359; American Sugar Refining Co. v. New Orleans, 181 U. S. 277; American Security Co. v. District of Columbia, 224 U. S. 491; Inter-Island Steam Navigation Co. v. Ward, 242 U. S. 1.
Finally, it is urged that practice since the Judiciary Act of 1925 sanctions the present assumption of jurisdiction. Cases like Ex parte Northern Pacific Ry. Co., 280 U. S. 142, ordering a district judge to summon three judges to hear a suit under § 266 of the Judicial Code (28 U. S. C. § 380), must be put to one side. This is one of the excepted classes under the Act of 1925 in which direct review lies from a district court to the Supreme Court, and it is therefore an orthodox utilization of an ancillary writ, within the rule of In re Massachusetts, supra. Of all the other cases in which, since the Act of 1925, a writ was authorized to be issued, none is comparable to the circumstances of the present case. In one, Ex parte Kawato, supra, the appellate jurisdiction of this Court was invoked only after appellate jurisdiction was denied by a circuit court of appeals. Another, Ex parte United States, 287 U. S. 241, while in form a review of action by a district court, was in fact an independent suit by the United States, because no appeal as such lay from the refusal of *598the district judge in that case to issue a bench warrant in denial of his duty. If the suit was a justiciable controversy through use of the ancillary writ, it was equally justiciable if regarded as an original suit by the United States. While, to be sure, it was not formally such, and while an ordinary suit by the United States to enforce an obligation against one of its citizens properly cannot be brought within the original jurisdiction of this Court, Ex parte United States, supra, was quite different. There the United States sought enforcement of a public duty for which no redress could be had in any other court. Therefore, the considerations which led this Court in United States v. Texas, 143 U. S. 621, to allow the United States to initiate an original suit in. this Court, although the merely literal language of the Constitution precluded it (as the dissent in that case insisted), might have been equally potent to allow assumption of such jurisdiction in the circumstances of Ex parte United States. But, in any event, merely because there is no other available judicial relief is no reason for taking appellate jurisdiction. For some situations the only appropriate remedy is corrective legislation. Of the same nature were four other cases, three suits by Maryland and one by Colorado. Maryland v. Soper (1), 270 U. S. 9; Maryland v. Soper (2), 270 U. S. 36; Maryland v. Soper (3), 270 U. S. 44; Colorado v. Symes, 286 U. S. 510. These cases were not ordinary claims by a state against one of its citizens for which the state courts are the appropriate tribunals, see California v. Southern Pacific Co., 157 U. S. 229. They were in effect suits by states against federal functionaries in situations in which the citizenship of these functionaries was irrelevant to the controversy. And so the considerations that made the controversies by Maryland and Colorado justiciable through ancillary writs might have been equally relevant in establishing justiciability for original suits in this Court under Article III, § 2. It is not without sig*599nifieance that the Maryland v. Soper cases and Colorado v. Symes, which the Court now regards as precedents for the ruling in Ex parte United States, were not even referred to in the opinion in the latter case.
If Ex parte United States, the Maryland v. Soper cases, and Colorado v. Symes, supra, are not to be supported on the basis of their peculiar circumstances which might have justified the Court in assuming jurisdiction, they should be candidly regarded as deviations from the narrow limits within which our appellate jurisdiction should move. They would then belong with the occasional lapses which occur when technical questions of jurisdiction are not properly presented to the Court and consciously met. That leaves two other cases, Los Angeles Brush Corp. v. James, 272 U. S. 701, and McCullough v. Cosgrave, 309 U. S. 634. In the Los Angeles Brush case, the Court explicitly refused to invoke authority to issue an ancilliary writ inasmuch as the appellate jurisdiction of the controversy belonged to the Circuit Court of Appeals and not to this Court. The case concerned “the enforcement of the Equity Rules,” 272 U. S. at 706, and the power which this Court recognized in that case was part of the duty imposed upon the Court by Congress to formulate and put in force the Equity Rules. The McCullough case was equally restricted. It merely followed the Los Angeles Bi ush case in enforcing the Equity Rules.
To be sure, Ex parte United States, supra, stated that later cases had qualified In re Massachusetts and In re Glaser, supra. But the cases that were avouched (McClellan v. Carland, 217 U. S. 268; Ex parte Abdu, 247 U. S. 27) in no wise called into question In re Massachusetts and In re Glaser, and the actual decisions left them intact. The authority of In re Massachusetts, supra, and In re Glaser, supra, was unquestioned as late as 1923, in Magnum Co. v. Coty, 262 U. S. 159, after, that is, the cases referred to in Ex parte United States, supra, as having *600limited In re Massachusetts and In re Glaser. The essence of the Act of 1925 was curtailment of our appellate jurisdiction as a measure necessary for the effective discharge of the Court’s functions. It is hardly consonant with this restrictive purpose of the Act of 1925 to enlarge the opportunities to come to this Court beyond the limit recognized and enforced under the Act of 1891 — that there can be no ancillary jurisdiction where the litigation on the merits could not directly come here for review. In only one of the cases since the Act of 1925 in which the ancillary writs were invoked in situations in which this Court did not have direct appellate jurisdiction, did counsel call to the attention of this Court the bearing of the Act of 1925 upon the power to issue ancillary writs and the relevance of cases prior to that Act, and in no case did this Court apparently address itself to the problem now canvassed. Authority exercised sub silentio does not establish jurisdiction. Throughout its history it has been the firm policy of this Court not to recognize the exercise of jurisdiction under such circumstances as precedents when the question is first sharply brought for decision. United States v. More, 3 Cranch 159, 172; Snow v. United States, 118 U. S. 346, 354-55; Cross v. Burke, 146 U. S. 82, 87; Louisville Trust Co. v. Knott, 191 U. S. 225, 236; Arant v. Lane, 245 U. S. 166, 170.
In deciding whether to give a latitudinarian or a restricted scope to the appellate jurisdiction of this Court, the important factor is the number of instances in which applications for the exercise of the Court’s jurisdiction has been or may be made, not the number of instances in which the jurisdiction has been exercised. And so it tells little that less than ten applications for mandamus have been granted since the Act of 1925. What is far more important is that merely for the first seven Terms after that Act not less than seventy-two applications for such writs were made. Every application consumes time in consideration, whether eventually granted or denied.
*601Had the Court jurisdiction, this case would furnish no occasion for its exercise. On whatever technical basis of jurisdiction the availability of these writs may have been founded, their use has been reserved for very special circumstances. However varying the language of justification, these ancillary writs have been issued only to further some imperative claim of justice. In the present case, the upshot of these proceedings is to circumvent the intermediate appellate court as the natural and normal resort for relief from a claim of want of jurisdiction in the district court.
No palpable exigency either of national or international import is made manifest for seeking-this extraordinary relief here. For all practical purposes, the litigation has ceased to concern a vessel belonging to a sister republic. While, to be sure, the legal issues turn on the claim of sovereign immunity by Peru in a vessel libeled in an American harbor, the ship has long since been released and the actual stake of the controversy is a bond. Thus the case for our intervention, to the disregard of the Circuit Court of Appeals, cannot be put higher than the propriety of vindicating the dignity of a friendly foreign state.
But surely this is to introduce the formal elegancies of diplomacy into the severe business of securing legal rights through the judicial machinery normally adapted for the purpose. After all, if the framers of the Constitution had deemed litigation in this Court alone to comport with appropriate regard for the dignity of a friendly foreign state, they would have given this Court original jurisdiction in such cases. If our nearest neighbors wished to litigate in this country, they could not bring suit in this Court. See Monaco v. Mississippi, 292 U. S. 313. It is not deemed incompatible with the dignity of the United States itself to begin suit in a district court, have the litigation proceed to the circuit court of appeals, and only *602by our leave reach this Court. See, e. g., United States v. California, 297 U. S. 175. Litigation involving the interests of the United States in ships owned by it has twice recently gone through this normal process, and it will not be thought that the dignity of the United States was thereby compromised. Indeed, under the arrangements made by Congress in 1925, measures deemed indispensable for the conduct of the war could be nullified by district courts and could not come here for review until appeal was duly taken to the circuit courts of appeals. To be sure, Congress has wisely provided that once such an appeal is filed this Court in its discretion may bring the appeal here. See, e. g., White v. Mechanics Securities Corp., 269 U. S. 283; Norman v. B. & O. R. Co., 294 U. S. 240, 294-95; Ex parte Quirin, 317 U. S. 1, 19-20. To require a foreign state to seek relief in an orderly fashion through the circuit court of appeals can imply an indifference to the dignity of a sister nation only on the assumption that circuit courts of appeals are not courts of great authority. Our federal judicial system presupposes the contrary. Certainly this Court should in every possible way attribute to these courts a prestige which invites reliance for the burdens of appellate review except in those cases, relatively few, in which this Court is called upon to adjudicate constitutional issues or other questions of national importance.
To remit a controversy like this to the circuit court of appeals where it properly belongs is not to be indifferent to claims of importance but to be uncompromising in safeguarding the conditions which alone will enable this Court to discharge well the duties entrusted exclusively to us. The tremendous and delicate problems which call for the judgment of the nation's ultimate tribunal require the utmost conservation of time and energy even for the ablest judges. Listening to arguments and studying records and briefs constitute only a fraction of what goes into the *603judicial process. For one thing, as the present law reports compared with those of even a generation ago bear ample testimony, the types of cases that now come before the Court to a considerable extent require study of materials outside the technical law books. But more important, the judgments of this Court are collective judgments. Such judgments presuppose ample time and freshness of mind for private study and reflection in preparation for discussions in Conference. Without adequate study there cannot be adequate reflection; without adequate reflection there cannot be adequate discussion; without adequate discussion there cannot be that mature and fruitful interchange of minds which is indispensable to wise decisions and luminous opinions.
It is therefore imperative that the docket of the Court be kept down, that no case be taken which does not rise to the significance of inescapability for the responsibility entrusted to this Court. Every case that is allowed to come here which, judged by these standards, may well be left either to the state courts or to the circuit courts of appeals, makes inroads upon thought and energy which properly belong to the limited number of cases which only this Court can adjudicate. Even a judge of such unique gifts and experience as Mr. Justice Holmes felt at the very height of his powers, as we now know, the whip of undue pressure in his work. One case is not just one case more, and does not stop with being just one more case. Chief Justice Taft was not the last judge who, as he said of himself, “having a kind heart, I am inclined to grant probably more [discretionary reviews] than is wise.” (Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 68th Cong., 2d Sess., on H. R. 8206, p. 27.)
In a case like this, we should deny our power to exercise jurisdiction. But, in any event, we should refuse to exercise it. By such refusal we would discourage future *604applications of a similar kind, and thereby enforce those rigorous standards in this Court’s judicial administration which alone will give us the freshness and vigor of thought and spirit that are indispensable for wise decisions in the causes committed to us.
Me. Justice Reed is of the opinion that this Court has jurisdiction to grant the writ requested, Ex parte United States, 287 U. S. 241, but concurs in this dissent on the ground that application for the writ sought should have been made first to the Circuit Court of Appeals.

 “Sec. 238. A direct review by the Supreme Court of an interlocutory or final judgment or decree of a district court may be had where it is so provided in the following Acts or parts of Acts, and not otherwise:
(1) Section 2 of the Act of February 11, 1903, ‘to expedite the hearing and determination’ of certain suits brought by the United States under the antitrust or interstate commerce laws, and so forth.
(2) The Act of March 2, 1907, ‘providing for writs of error in certain instances in criminal cases’ where the decision of the district court is adverse to the United States.
(3) An Act restricting the issuance of interlocutory injunctions to suspend the enforcement of the statute of a State or of an order made by an administrative board or commission created by and acting under the statute of a State, approved March 4, 1913, which Act is hereby amended by adding at the end thereof, ‘The requirement respecting the presence of three judges shall also apply to the final hearing in such suit in the district court; and a direct appeal to the Supreme Court may be taken from a final decree granting or denying a permanent injunction in such suit.’
(4) So much of ‘An Act making appropriations to supply urgent deficiencies in appropriations for the fiscal year 1913, and for other purposes,’ approved October 22, 1913, as relates to the review of interlocutory and final judgments and decrees in suits to enforce, suspend, or set aside orders of the Interstate Commerce Commission other than for the payment of money.
(5) Section 316 of ‘An Act to regulate interstate and foreign commerce in livestock, livestock products, dairy products, poultry, poultry products, and eggs, and for other purposes’ approved August 15, 1921.” 43 Stat. 936, 938.