Court Opinion

ID: 8862549
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-26 17:53:40.993776+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:05:52.795346
License: Public Domain

HUGHES, District Judge.
I do not think the first point of complainant is well taken. This is a court of equity. The original suit is a cause in equity, and the part of it now here is a controversy in equity. The petitioner, Wright, has, by concession, expended $25,000 in developing a quarry on the 100-acre tract which he claims to have leased. If there is any forfeiture, it is through his laches. Under such circumstances, objections to a proceeding which are merely technical, and founded upon old principles of the common law, will not be heard to defeat the right of this court to a jurisdiction conferred by law, or the right of a nonresident to remove his controversy to this tribunal, if authorized to do so by express statutes of the United States. But I do not think the controversy is properly here. That part of the act of congress which was passed in 1866, and which now stands as section 639 in the Eevised Statutes, is no longer in force, to authorize the removal of a part only of a suit from a state into a federal court, leaving the remainder in the court in which it originated. If was in that respect repealed by the second clause of the second section of the jurisdictional act of March 3, 1875, which authorizes the removal of the whole suit in any case in which there is a controversy to which citizens of different states are parties actually interested. See Supp. Rev. St. p. 174. This meaning seems apparent enough from the tenor of the clause. But, if it were before doubtful, the language of the supreme court of the United States in Barney v. Latham, 103 U. S. 212, settles the question, which was as follows:
“While the act of 1S66 in express terms authorized the removal only of the separable controversy between the plaintiff and the defendant or defendants seeking such removal, leaving the remainder of the suit, at the election of the plaintiff, in the state court, the act of 1875 provided, in that class of cases, for the removal of the entire suit. That such was the intention of congress is a proposition which seems too obvious to require enforcement by argument. While the act of 1866 expressly confines the removal to that part of the suit which specially relates to or concerns the defendant seeking the removal, there is nothing whatever in the act of 1875 justifying the conclusion that congress intended to leave any part of a suit in the state court where the right of removal was given to, and was exercised by, any of the parties to a separable controversy therein. Much confusion and embarrassment, as well as increase in the cost of litigation, had been found to result from the provision in the former act permitting the separation of controversies arising in a suit, removing some to the federal court, and leaving others in tue state court, for determination. It was often convenient to embrace in one suit all the controversies which were so far connected by their circumstances as to make all who sue or are sued proper, though not indispensable, parties. Rather than split up such a suit between courts of different jurisdictions, congress determined that the removal of the separable controversy, to which the judicial power of the United States extended, should operate to transfer the whole suit to the federal court.”
So, also, in Hyde v. Ruble, 104 U. S. 407, tbe supreme court expressly held that section 639 was repealed by the act of March 3, 1875.
Pursuant to this authoritative exposition of the effect of that clause of the act of 1875 which has been alluded to, the motion to remand must be granted, and that part of the suit which is here be remanded to the state court.