Court Opinion

ID: 9418162
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:11:04.491506+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:21:56.520210
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Holmes,
with whom concurred Mr. Justice White and Mr. Justice McKenna,
dissenting.
This is a question of the title to real estate.' It does not matter in what form of action it-arises; the decision must be the same in. an action of tort that it would be in a writ of right. — The title to real estate ii^ general depends upon the statutes and decisions of the fetate within which it lies. I think it a thing to be regretted if, while in the great mass of cases the state courts finally determine who is the "owner of land, how much he owns and what he conveys by- his deed, the courts of the United States, when by accident and exception the. same question comes before them; do not follow what for all ordinary purposes is the law.
I admit that plenty of language can be found in. the earlier cases to support the present decision. That is not surprising in view of the uncertainty and vacillation of the theory upon which Swift v. Tyson, 16 Pet. 1, and the later extensions of its doctrine have proceeded. But I suppose it will be admitted on the other side that éven the independent jurisdiction of the Circuit Courts of the . United States is a jurisdiction only to declare the law, at least in a case like the present, and only to declare the law-of the State. It is not an authority to make it. Swift v. Tyson was justified on the ground *371that that was all that the state courts did. But as has.been pointed out by a recent accomplished and able writer, that fiction had to be abandoned and was abandoned when this court came to decide the municipal bond cases, beginning with Gelpcke v. Dubuque, 1 Wall. 175. Gray, Nature and Sources of the Law, §§ 535-550. In those cases' the court followed Chief Justice Taney in Ohio Life Ins. & Trust Co. v. Debolt, 16 How. 416, in recognizing the fact that decisions of state courts of last resort make law for the State. The principle is that a change of judicial decision after a contract has been made on the faith of an earlier one the other way is a change of the law.
The cases of the class to which I refer have not stood on the ground that this cóurt agreed with the first decision, but on the ground that the state decision made the law for the State, and therefore should be given only a prospective operation when contracts had been entered into under the law as earlier declared. Douglass v. Pike County, 101 U. S. 677. Green County v. Conness, 109 U. S. 104. In various instances this court has changed its decision or rendered different decisions on similar facts arising in different States in order to conform to what is recognized as the local law. Fairfield v. Gallatin County, 100 U. S. 47.
Whether Swift v. Tyson can be reconciled with Gelpcke v. Dubuque, I do not care to enquire. I assume both cases to represent settled doctrines, whether. reconcilable Or not. But the moment you leave those principles which it is desirable to make uniform throughout the United States and which the decisions of this court tend to make uniform, obviously it is most undesirable for the courts of the United States to appear as interjecting an occasional arbitrary exception to a rule that in every other case prevails. I never yet have heard a statement of an$ reason justifying the power, and I find it hard to imagine one. The rule in Gelpcke v. Dubuque gives no help when the contract or grant in question has not. been made on the faith of a previous declaration of *372law. I know of no authority ir 'this court to say that in general state decisions shall make law only for the future. Judicial decisions have had retrospective operation for near a thousand years. There were enough difficulties in the way, even in cases like Gelpcke v. Dubuque, but in them there was a suggestion or smack of constitutional right. Here there is nothing of that^sort... It is said that we must exercise our independent judgment — but as to what? Surely as to the law of the States. Whence does that law issue? Certainly not from us. But it does issue and has been recognized by this court as issuing from the state courts as well as from the state legislatures. When we know what the source of the law has said that it shall "bo, our authority is at an end. The law of a State does not become something outside of the state court and independent of it by being called the common law. Whatever it is called it is the law as declared by.the state judges and nothing else.
If, as I believe, my reasoning is correct, it justifies our stopping when we come to a kind of case that by nature and necessity is peculiarly local, and one as to which the latest intimations and indeed decisions of this court are wholly in accord with what I think to be sound law.. I refer to the language of the court speaking through Mr. Justice Miller in Brine v. Hartford Fire Insurance Co., 96 U. S. 627. To administer a different law (p. 635) is “to introduce into the jurisprudence of the State_ of Illinois the discordant elements of a substantial right which is protected in one set of courts and denied in the.other, with no superior to decide which is right.” I refer also to the unanimous decision in East Central Eureka Mining Co. v. Central Eureka Mining Co., 204. U. S. 266, 272. It is admitted that we are bound by a settled course ■ of decisions, irrespective of contract, because they make the law. I see no reason why we are less bound by a single one.
Mr. Justice White and Mr. Justice McKenna concur in this dissent.