Court Opinion

ID: 9445655
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:35:28.849433+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:21.848467
License: Public Domain

JAMES ALGER FEE, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
Since this case has been sent back for partial retrial, the grounds of this dissent should be set out. We should have affirmed the judgment of the trial court.
It is admitted that this is an appeal upon questions of fact. No legal principles are involved. This Court is not empowered to write new findings of fact. It can reverse when the findings are clearly erroneous only when, on the entire evidence, the reviewing court is left with a definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been made.
Therefore, we must be convinced from the record in the particular case that the mistake was made. Collateral considerations as to what some other trial court or any appellate court may have thought about some state of facts in a different case more or less remotely analogous are not proper for consideration.
Here our colleagues seem to rely, not on the record as a whole upon which the trial court based its judgment, but upon such remote analogies. Reliance is placed by them upon inferences drawn from the attitudes of other courts in a series of cases painstakingly accumulated by Judge Barnes which they feel command findings of fact contrary to those actually found by the District Court. Such a process equates a conclusion drawn on a cold record from an aggregate of facts with a rule of law.
The knowledge of local customs of business and personalities of witnesses is present with the trial judge. We know the business methods of New York City might lead to entirely different findings than those of Oregon. The trial judge in the vicinity is alone capable of appreciating the subtleties of his own business community. We should not attempt to build up an empirical rule of law which would bind this vast'circuit.
The findings of the trial judge, based as they were upon intent of Colonel Woodlaw, should be controlling. The judgment of the sole stockholder and active manager of the corporation as to what measures were best for it could well be accepted by the trial judge.
The judgment should be affirmed.