Court Opinion

ID: 9422014
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:00:53.877694+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:33.971538
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
whom Mr. Justice Harlan and Mr. Justice Brennan join,
dissenting.*
My special disagreement with the Court in this case concerns a matter of judicial administration arising out of the fact that after the question on the merits had been considered by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the same question between the same parties was later independently again adjudicated by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. I cannot join the Court’s approval of the right of the Seventh Circuit to make such a re-examination. It is true that in its opinion in this case and No. 26, Sullivan v. Behimer, decided today, the Court settles the question over which the two Courts of Appeals disagreed, so that it should not recur. This is not, however, an isolated case. A general principle of judicial administration in the federal courts is at stake. In addition, while the Court today settles one problem arising in the application of § 1404 (a), other questions involving that section may readily give rise to conflicting *346views among the eleven Courts of Appeals. Under the Court's opinion, for example, transfer always depends upon the meaning of the federal venue statutes, and upon the jurisdiction of the transferee court over the person of the defendant, which may be a problem of constitutional dimensions, and there is obviously a substantial opportunity for conflict between the Courts of Appeals over those matters. We ought to forestall in other situations of potential controversy the kind of judicial unseemliness which this case discloses.
Plaintiffs brought this action for patent infringement in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Defendants moved pursuant to 28 U. S. C. § 1404 (a) to have it transferred to the Northern District of Illinois. Finding transfer to be “for the convenience of parties and witnesses, in the interest of justice,” the Texas District Court granted the motion and transferred the action to Illinois. Plaintiffs sought a writ of mandamus in the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to require the Texas District Court to set aside the transfer. In plaintiffs' view the Northern District of Illinois was not a place where the action “might have been brought,” and thus the Texas District Court had no power to transfer the action there under § 1404 (a). The Fifth Circuit fully examined the merits of this claim and rejected it, holding that in the circumstances before the court the Northern District of Illinois was a jurisdiction where the action “might have been brought.” Leave to file a mandamus petition was therefore denied, and the action was duly transferred. 245 F. 2d 737.
Upon the assignment of the action to the calendar of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, plaintiffs moved that court to disregard the explicit decision of another District Court in the same case, sustained by the appropriate Court of *347Appeals, and to send the ease back to Texas. Plaintiffs advanced precisely the claim already rejected by the Fifth Circuit, namely, that the Northern District of Illinois was not a place where the action “might have been brought” within the proper meaning of § 1404 (a). Transfer had, in their view, erroneously been ordered by the Texas District Court and the power to transfer erroneously approved by the Fifth Circuit. Plaintiffs’ application was denied by the Illinois District Court. Still not accepting the decision against them, plaintiffs again sought an appellate remedy by way of mandamus, this time in the Court of Appeals 'for the Seventh Circuit. Initially, mandamus was denied. On rehearing, however, the Seventh Circuit held that the prior decision of the Fifth Circuit was wrong. It held that § 1404 (a) did not authorize transfer to Illinois, and it ordered the action “remanded” to the Texas District Court within the Fifth Circuit, from whence it had come, to go forward there. 260 F. 2d 317. That “remand” is the order which is here on certiorari. 359 U. S. 904.
The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has thus refused to permit an Illinois District Court to entertain an action transferred to it with the approval, after full consideration of the problem involved, of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The Seventh Circuit considered no evidence not before the Fifth Circuit in so deciding. It considered precisely the same issue and reached a contrary legal conclusion. This was after explicit prior adjudication of the question at the same level of the federal system in the same case and between the same parties. Because the question involved is the transferability of the action, the consequence of the Seventh Circuit’s disregard of the Fifth Circuit’s prior decision is not only that a question once decided has been reopened, with all the wasted motion, delay and *348expense which that normally entails. Unless and until this Court acts, the litigants have no forum in which trial may go forward. Each Court of Appeals involved has refused to have the District Court in its Circuit hear the case and has sent it to a District Court in the other.
This is the judicial conduct the Court now approves. The Court does not suggest that the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit was powerless, was without jurisdiction, to review, as it did, the question of the applicability of § 1404 (a) to this case. The occasion for the Fifth Circuit's review by way of mandamus may have been, as the Court suggests, “to protect its appellate jurisdiction,” but there can be no question that the Fifth Circuit undertook to and did resolve on its merits the controversy between the parties regarding the meaning of § 1404 (a). Yet the Court decides that the review in the Fifth Circuit was so much wasted motion, properly ignored by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in arriving at a contrary result. The case is treated just as if the Fifth Circuit had never considered the questions involved in it. I am at a loss to appreciate why all the considerations bearing on the good administration of justice which underlie the' technical doctrine of res judicata did not apply here to require the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit to defer to the previous decision. “Public policy dictates that there be an end of litigation; that those who have contested an issue shall be bound by the result of the contest, and that matters once tried shall be considered forever settled as between the parties. We see no reason why this doctrine should not apply in every case where one voluntarily appears, presents his case and is fully heard, and why he should not, in the absence of fraud, be thereafter concluded by the judgment of the tribunal to which he has submitted his cause.” Baldwin v. Traveling Men’s Assn., 283 U. S. 522, 525-526. One would suppose that these considerations would be *349especially important in enforcing comity among federal courts of equal authority.
The fact that the issue involved is the propriety of a transfer of the action only makes the case for deference to the previous decision of a coordinate court in the same litigation that much stronger. The course of judicial action now approved by the Court allows transfer over a persisting objection only when concurred in by two sets of courts: those in the place where the case begins, and those in the place to which transfer is ordered. Not only does the place of trial thus remain unsettled for an unnecessarily long time to accommodate double judicial consideration, but, as this case shows, the result of a disagreement between the courts involved is that the litigation cannot go forward at all unless this Court resolves the matter. Surely a seemly system of judicial remedies, especially appellate judicial remedies, regarding controverted transfer provisions of the United States Code should encourage, not discourage, quick settlement of questions of transfer and should preclude two Courts of Appeals from creating, through their disagreement in the same case, an impasse to the litigation which only this Court can remove. Section 1404 (a) was meant to serve the ends of “convenience” and “justice” in the trial of actions. It perverts those ends to permit a question arising under § 1404 (a), as here, to be litigated, in turn, before a District Court and Court of Appeals in one Circuit, and a District Court and Court of Appeals in another Circuit, one thousand miles distant, thereby delaying trial for a year and a half, only to have the result of all that preliminary litigation be that trial may not go forward at all until this Court shall settle the question of where it shall go forward, after at least another year’s delay.
We are not vouchsafed claims of reason or of the due administration of justice that require the duplication of *350appellate remedies approved by the Court in this case. Why is not a single judicial appellate remedy in a Court of Appeals entirely adequate for one aggrieved by a transfer? Once the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit had decided, after due consideration, that the proper meaning of § 1404 (a) included Illinois as a place where the action “might have been brought,” this should have ended the matter, except of course for this Court’s power of review of that decision through the writ of certiorari, a power which we declined to exercise in this case. Nor does such a view of right and wise judicial administration depend upon the nature of the procedural or even jurisdictional issue in controversy. Technically, res judioata controls even a decision on a matter of true jurisdiction. “We see no reason why a court, in the absence of an allegation of fraud in obtaining the judgment, should examine again the question whether the court making the earlier determination on an actual contest over jurisdiction between the parties, did have jurisdiction of the subject matter of the litigation.” Stoll v. Gottlieb, 305 U. S. 165, at 172. See also Baldwin v. Traveling Men’s Assn., supra, 283 U. S. 522. Surely, a prior decision of a federal court on the unfunda-mental issue of venue ought to receive similar respect from a coordinate federal court when the parties and the facts are the same. The question is of the appropriate scheme of judicial remedies for enforcing rights under a federal remedial statute aimed at enhancing the fair administration of justice in the federal courts. It is not consonant with reason to permit a duplicate appellate procedure for questions under this statute, thereby forestalling final decision on a pre-trial matter which ought to be decided as expeditiously as possible, causing wasteful delay and expense, and thus depriving the statutory motion to transfer of effectiveness in achieving the ends of “convenience” and “justice” for which it was created.

[This opinion applies only to No. 25, Hoffman v. Blaski. For opinion of Mr. Justice Frankfurter, joined by Mr. Justice Harlan and Mr. Justice Brennan, in No. 26, Sullivan v. Behimer, see post, p. 351.]