Court Opinion

ID: 9653762
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 17:53:41.479356+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:01.363973
License: Public Domain

L. HAND, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The case turns upon whether the seizure by the “Labor Committee” — which, I agree, was a conversion of the cotton — eventually became a “confiscation * * * by duly constituted governmental or civil authorities”; and whether that was enough, confiscation being initially equivocal. Upon that I can find no authority, nor should I indeed expect to find any; the question is how we shall read the words in this particular context. The risk insured against was only of lawless violence, except in the case of “Explosion.” A seizure by an agency on behalf of a government, though not then authorized, whose act that government later adopts as its own, appears to me not to be within that risk, and I read the exception in confirmation of that conclusion. That does make liability depend upon a later event — if the “governmental or civil authorities” do not *237adopt the act, it is not a confiscation — but I can see no difficulty in that. There remains the question of the interpretation of the stipulation: i. e., whether we should say that the “Labor Committee” did seize the cotton on behalf of the Catalan Government conditionally upon that government’s adoption of the seizure as its own. It seized it for “delivery” to the “Cotton Committee,” and while the status of that body is more amorphous than I could wish, we do have it that it was “semiofficial,” “duly constituted” and “depending” on the government at Madrid. Formally, there is a difficulty that the “Cotton Committee” “depended” upon the Madrid government, not upon the Catalan; but nobody has suggested that as a valid distinction, and I pass it. If it is not, the later action of the Catalan government was a full'adoption of the act of the “Labor Committee,” made upon behalf of the subsidiary agency, the “Cotton Committee,” and so of itself. The letter of our State Department says that the Catalan government “sanctioned” the seizure “with assumption of responsibility.” That in my judgment was all that it could do, and quite enough.