Court Opinion

ID: 9640188
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:00:25.526171+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:28.027458
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
In connection with the appealability of the District Court’s decree disposing of the claim of copyright infringement, without adjudication of the claim for unfair competition, I desire, out of abundant caution, to stress a point perhaps made sufficiently clear in the opinion, that decisions as to the extent of a “claim” or a “cause of action” or a “transaction” must necessarily be directed to the facts in issue in a particular case and cannot be safely generalized into rigid rules applicable to other factual situations, or to other issues such as those of res judicata, amendment, joinder, counterclaim, or jurisdiction. The attempt to formulate and follow such rigid rules in the past has been generally unsuccessful, as well as prejudicial to the development of effective court procedure and at times unfair to litigants. (This matter has been often discussed by writers; I have attempted to state these views more at length elsewhere, as in my text on Code Pleading, pp. 75-87, and in 82 U. of Pa.L.Rev. 354.) One of the hopes for the new federal rules of civil procedure has been that these *87difficulties may be in large measure avoided or at least lessened.
The variable character of “cause of action” has been pointed out in Hurn v. Oursler, 289 U.S. 238, 53 S.Ct. 586, 77 L.Ed. 1148, and in the case it cites, United States v. Memphis Cotton Oil Co., 288 U.S. 62, 53 S.Ct. 278, 77 L.Ed. 619. Because of its illusive character, that concept has been entirely omitted from the new rules; but a similar idea is conveyed in rules such as the one cited and relied on here, Rule 54(b), providing for “Judgment at Various Stages” of the action. These rules make the extent of the claim involved depend not upon legal rights, but upon the facts, that is, upon a lay view of the past events which have given rise to the litigation. Such lay view of a transaction or occurrence, the subject matter of a claim, is not a precise concept; its outer limits should depend to a considerable extent upon the purpose for which the concept is being immediately used.
Here the two claims in suit do arise out of the plaintiff’s ownership of one piece of literary property, and under certain circumstances, as in Hurn v. Oursler, supra, a holding that only a single cause of action is presented is quite proper. It may be noted, too, that this case differs from Hurn v. Oursler, where the two claims were based on the same facts throughout “so precisely,” as the court put it, “as to be little more than the equivalent of different epithets to characterize the same group of circumstances” [289 U.S. 238, 246, 53 S.Ct. 590, 77 L.Ed. 1148] ; for here the factual basis of the claim for unfair competition is quite distinct from that for the copyright infringement and rests entirely upon the matter of the book’s title, which is not covered by the copyright. Here the evidence to support the first claim would to a considerable extent be different from, and in addition to, that for the second claim, and there would be little, if any, gain in forcing them always to be tried and adjudicated together. As the opinion points out, the trial judge has a practical discretion to dispose of them together, but when the natural course of trial indicates that one claim can be disposed of quickly and summarily while the other will require a considerable trial, separation should be possible save in cases where the facts are so inextricably interwoven that it is impossible or at least manifestly unfair. At any rate, the new rule is flexible enough to permit a useful adjustment of such a situation, and I concur in the view that the earlier precedents which deserve our approval were to the same effect.