Court Opinion

ID: 9450792
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:57:53.922605+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:27.154850
License: Public Domain

SIMPSON, District Judge
(concurring) :
My agreement with the opinion prepared by Chief Judge TUTTLE for the Court is complete and without reservation. Ordinarily, Judge RIVES’ dissenting opinion — with which, despite its characteristic force and persuasiveness, I dis*651agree on nearly all questions raised— would call for no amplification by me of the views I share with Judge TUTTLE. Perhaps here the majority view is so clear as to be better left without attempted embellishment. But, since Judge RIVES wrote his dissent after and with a weather eye upon that of Judge TUT-TLE, and not, as sometimes occurs, after a conference in which all views are exchanged and argued to decision, I feel justified in pre-empting for the majority the trial lawyer’s cherished right to “open and close”.
First, I would emphasize that the Complaint here sets forth only one claimed breach of legal duty; only one “claim” or “cause of action”, not two; only one basis for recovery. The only duality I can discover is in theories of recovery and computation of damages.
It is sophistry to assert the existence of two claims, one for “breach of trust” and a separate claim for “unjust enrichment”, giving rise to an equitable right to an accounting.1
As developed on pages 10-12 of Judge TUTTLE’s opinion and Footnote 4 thereof, the breach of trust, if it occurred, was simply the cause of the claimed unjust enrichment, not a separate and divisible “claim upon which relief may be granted”. The attempted division into two claims, or two “causes of action” will not withstand critical analysis.
The district judge had before him Rule 12(b) (6) 2 motions from all defendants addressed to the sufficiency of the Complaint. He concluded, rightly, I think, (and not, as I read Judge RIVES' opinion, questioned by him) that the Florida three year Statute of Limitations 3 was applicable, and was proper for the Court to consider in disposing of Rule 12(b) (6) motions, provided the facts pleaded by the Complaint were sufficiently complete to demonstrate the limitation statute’s application. He applied the limitation statute to what he, and now Judge RIVES, mistakenly, we think, (supra and pages 10-12 of the majority opinion) construed as the first (breach of trust) of two separate and distinct claims or causes of action.
Our holding, in summary, is: that only one claim, not two, existed; that all, not part of it, was time-barred under the Florida Statute when suit was brought; and that the district court’s attempted dichotomy was impermissible, as without legal or factual basis.
*652The judgment below was brought here on appeal, not just part of it, as Judge RIVES argues, and the majority opinion simply directs that that judgment, now under our jurisdiction on appeal, be modified below to meet these views. Upon remand the suit will stand dismissed with prejudice, not with one portion of an indivisible whole dismissed with prejudice, and the remainder thereof dismissed without prejudice, as the district judge incorrectly attempted.4
In the next place, I have no quarrel with the legal and equitable principles discussed by Judge RIVES at pages 653 and 654 of the dissent, with respect to the duties and liabilities of fiduciaries and those in privity with them toward a legally wronged or defraudad beneficiary. I accept also, without giving it the significance assigned to it by Judge RIVES, the statement that there remains a locus penitentiae, that the fiduciary and his privies owe a duty of restitution to the beneficiary.
Of course this is so, otherwise there would never accrue a right of action, the breach of the legal duty to restore gains acquired through breach of trust.
But does this mean that no right of action accrues (and hence no running of time under the limitation statute) until some indefinite time in the future when both an opportunity to restore, and a failure to restore have taken place, as Judge RIVES appears to argue? I do not believe so, but rather that once the beneficiary has knowledge, actual or constructive, of the wrong to him and his purse, actual or potential, great or slight, the inexorable and inescapable time-running process of the limitation statute takes hold. This occurred, according to the Complaint in early November, 1958, more than three years before suit was filed.
Finally, if we of the majority have misunderstood and misconceived the nature and legal consequences of the matters set forth in the Complaint, and the appellant Ross does have two separate and severable claims, and if the dismissal of one claim without prejudice by the district judge ought of right to stand undisturbed, (as unappealed by the defendants and now final) it should be kept in mind that the dismissal of this claim is permitted to stand. All that is removed is the “without prejudice” label appended to that dismissal by the district court.
If this provision of the order appealed from were permitted to stand undisturbed, and if our views as to the accrual date (November, 1958) of all claims, or partial claims, or parts of claim, are correct,5 and we believe they are, and suit was later brought by Ross, the defendants could raise the Florida 3-year limitation statute (Fla.Stat. Sec. 95.11(5), F.S.A. supra) as a bar to recovery. The bar would be complete. What and all that is accomplished by the present majority direction to the lower court is to afford the defendants (in a later suit) an additional plea in bar, former judgment.
Two bars accomplish no more than one, so that the jurisdictional argument is practically no more than an interesting intellectual exercise.6
*653With deference to and high respect for the views of Judge RIVES, I am constrained, after reconsideration of the majority opinion in the light of Judge RIVES’ opinion, to concur in Judge TUT-TLE’S opinion for the reasons lucidly set out by him and further upon the basis of the additional or amplified reasons here attempted to be developed.

. Old Florida and Alabama common law pleaders would question the complaint’s averment of “no adequate remedy at law” having in mind the catch-all common count in an action of assumpsit for “money had and received”, which, as the old cases demonstrate, could be based upon concepts of an equitable nature, or arising from equitable considerations. “Money had and received” was held to be broad enough to cover practically any situation developed at trial of the defendant being in possession of money or property rightfully belonging to the plaintiff, and for which money damages was an adequate remedy. This would include such conecpts, inter alia, as “breach of trust” and typically, “unjust enrichment”. Moss v. Condict, 154 Fla. 153, 16 So.2d 921; Sears v. Gulf Refining Co., 113 Fla. 714, 143 So. 759, 152 So. 1; Gordon v. Camp, 2 Fla. 422. Only if he needed discovery and examination of the defendants’ records to establish damages, or if money damages would not be adequate relief, (and hence in either event “no adequate remedy at law”) would the competent Florida pleader of my salad days have foregone a law action of assumpsit, with attendant jury trial of factual issues, for resort to bill in equity for accounting, usually tried twice, once before a Special Master in Chancery, and again before the Chancellor upon exceptions to the Master’s Report.
It is equally clear from old Florida cases that prosecution of either remedy to judgment gave rise to a plea in bar (Law) or complete equitable defense (Chancery) of former judgment or res judicata in the event that the parallel remedy was later asserted on the other side of the Court. Cragin, et al. v. Ocean & Lake Realty Co., 101 Fla. 1324, 135 So. 795 (dictum); See: Town of Boca Raton v. Moore, 122 Fla. 350, 165 So. 279; Kent, et al. v. Sutker, 40 So.2d 145.

. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

. Fla.Stat. Sec. 95.11(5), F.S.A.

. As a Florida country boy, I often beard rumors of, but never saw, tbe mysterious “joint snake”, commonly reputed to remain viable as two or more separate and complete snakes if chopped into two or more parts. I am even yet unable to assert with confidence (or competence) that such snakes do not exist. I can truthfully say that one has never come under my direct notice. Careful examination of the Complaint here raises no need for updating or revision of this statement. I still haven’t seen a “joint snake”.

. Judge RIVES’ opinion does not follow the district court’s conclusion that the two asserted claims accrued and will accrue at different times, i. e., one (breach of trust) now time-barred, one (unjust enrichment) now prematurely asserted.
He (Judge RIVES) argues only that both will accrue in the future, but presumably at the same time, “the conclusion of the Federal Power Commission’s decision and its review by the courts”. (Conclusion, page 21, dissent.)

. If we accept Gertrude Stein’s assertion that “a rose is a rose is a rose” it seems *653to me equally correct in this context to proclaim that “a bar is a bar is a bar”.