Court Opinion

ID: 9636604
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 14:35:06.965797+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:12:40.732787
License: Public Domain

DUFFY, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I concur in the opinion of Judge Kerner and agree, for the reasons therein stated, that the Housing and Rent Aot of 1947 contains a grant of general jurisdiction to the federal courts. However, additional reasons for this conclusion are to me very persuasive.
The provisions of the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942 gave an overcharged tenant the right to sue his landlord for treble damages. The resulting lawsuits were a valuable aid to enforcement of rent control. Congress continued such right of action in the Stabilization Act of 1942, the Stabilization Act of 1944, and in the Price Control Extension Act of 1946, which was effective to June 30, 1947. During this period the overcharged tenant had a choice of forums. In many areas where State court calendars were congested, the federal district courts were selected as the forum because such suits could be tried there without undue delay; in other areas State courts were reluctant to take on the burden of these actions involving small amounts and based upon federally created rights. We must assume that Congress knew that a great many of such tenant cases, without any limitation on the amount involved, had been commenced in the district courts throughout the country.
On the oral argument before this court counsel for defendants admitted that tenant suits for treble damages exceeding $3,000 have been and will be few and far between. There can be no dispute on that proposition, thus admitted. The one-year limitation in the act would keep the amount involved under the $3,000 figure in all but the most exceptional case.
*622The legislative history of the 1947 act is barren of any suggestion Congress intended. for the first time to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts in such tenant suits. The elimination of Sec. 205(c) in the 1947 act, while retaining the language, “suit to recover such amount may be brought in any Federal, State, or Territorial court of competent jurisdiction,” does not show an intention to close the doors of the federal courts to practically all tenant damage suits. To adopt defendant’s construction would mean that although Congress gave express permission to bring such tenant actions in the federal courts, no such right exists as a practical matter.
The passage of the Housing and Rent Act of 1947 was a matter of great public concern. Much publicity was given in the press to the subject of continuing rent control. Members of Congress were keenly aware of this public interest. Yet neither in committee reports nor in speeches by members of Congress was the slightest intimation given that, to all intents and purposes, actions by overcharged tenants were henceforth to be barred from the federal courts.
But defendants insist that the grant of general jurisdiction to the federal courts was provided in Sec. 205(c) of the 1942 Act, and that when that section in part was eliminated in the 1947 Act the law contained no such grant of jurisdiction. This argument is not sound. Sec. 205(c) was contained in the original bill as it passed the House of Representatives in 1941, at which time the bill contained only injunc-tive and criminal remedies. As all federal district courts already had jurisdiction, under the Judicial Code, to enforce such remedies, Sec. 205(c) could not have been inserted for tire purpose merely of granting federal jurisdiction. Rather it was intended to distinguish the jurisdiction of criminal cases, which was exclusively federal, from the jurisdiction of civil cases, which was concurrently State and federal. When the criminal sanctions were eliminated in the 1947 Act, it might have well appeared to Congress that no necessity to retain Sec. 205(c) in its previous form remained, in riew of the language authorizing that tenant damage suits could be brought in any federal, State or territorial court of competent jurisdiction.
It is interesting to note that in Sec. 206 (b) of the 1947 Act, authorizing injunction suits by the Housing Expediter, almost the same phraseology1 was used, even though all federal district courts were competent to hear such actions. It is apparent that the words, “competent jurisdiction,” did not limit the jurisdiction of the federal district courts in such actions.
Defendant insists upon a strict grammatical construction of the language used. But courts should not make a fortress out of 'the dictionary by a strict and 'literal interpretation which will defeat the dominating general purpose of the legislation. Markham v. Cabell, 326 U.S. 404, 409, 66 S.Ct. 193, 90 L.Ed. 165. “The meaning to be ascribed to an Act of Congress can only be derived from a considered weighing of every relevant aid to construction.” United States v. Dickerson, 310 U.S. 554, 562, 60 S.Ct. 1034, 1038, 84 L.Ed. 1356.
I agree that defendants’ motion should be denied.

 “ * * * fie may make application to any Federal, State, or Territorial court of competent jurisdiction * * * ”