Court Opinion

ID: 9636642
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 14:36:21.476852+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:47.613700
License: Public Domain

WOODROUGH, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) .
I think the majority opinion ably demonstrates the sufficiency of the insurance company’s bill in equity in that the bill discloses diversity and the federal jurisdictional amount involved;' that complete justice can not be done between the parties *16without equity accounting of the mutual interdependent dealings in regard to the thirteen insurance policies which are the subject of controversy in this suit; that plaintiff has no adequate remedy at law and that the defendant’s law actions and fragmentated equity suit present a multiplicity of suits preventable in equity. I also agree that Section, 265 does not deprive the federal courts of power to administer justice according to settled equity. But I do not concur in the conclusion reached herein by the majority. I do not think we should let the defendant go ahead with her wrongful multiplicity of suits, or content ourselves with merely asserting our jurisdiction, retaining it in this suit and adding this suit on to the others to swell the iniquitous multiplicity. The power we find in the court to prevent a substantial wrong implies a bounden duty to exercise the power and to prevent the wrong.
It seems to me no answer to the plaintiff herein to say that possibly the state courts will grant the plaintiff permission to get the substance of the. federal equity bill into the pleadings and evidence somewhere during, the progress of the multiplied suits pending in the state courts. Manifestly the law actions are intended, and in form adapted, to preclude any such thing being done, and the defendant herein has by motion and affidavit in this case asserted that her separate suits “arise out of independent transactions and none of them '(is) a part of the same subject of action”, and that “No case involves the same transaction.” The obvious object is to narrow the law actions to prevent adjudications therein from becoming determinative of rights on the several policies which are not included in her actions, and to deprive the plaintiff here of the accounting on the thirteen policies, to which it is entitled upon the facts pleaded in its equity bill. Defendant’s purpose is to have more law suits on the other policies after her six suits are ended. As we hold that the federal court has jurisdiction of plaintiff’s bill in equity, it follows, as I see it, that our courts are bound to protect the plaintiff in all the substantial rights asserted and drawn in controversy before us. After all, and fundamentally, the business of a court is to do complete and speedy justice between the litigants before it to the extent of its powers. And .this is so notwithstanding the court’s powers derive from diversity of citizenship. I think the Supreme Court’s monition against intrusion upon the state court jurisdiction on slender grounds of mere convenience in joinder (Di Giovanni v. Camden Fire Ins. Association, 296 U.S. 64, 56 S.Ct. 1, 80 L.Ed. 47) has no application to this case. There was no intention in that decision to take away the traditional power of the federal equity courts to stay a multiplicity of law actions where such actions afford no adequate remedy and where complete justice can be done only in the equity suit.
Here the substantial right to an accounting in a single equity suit in the federal courts arises upon the facts shown. There is no mere matter of convenience in joinder,, but on account of the recognized limitations of judicial powers in law actions the substantial rights of the plaintiff will be impaired or lost by suffering the multiplicity of suits to proceed. The wrong ought to be enjoined.