Court Opinion

ID: 9418625
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:34:16.969736+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:49:47.145685
License: Public Domain

*532Mr. Justice Holmes,
dissenting.
This is a suit brought by the respondent, The Brown and Yellow Taxicab and Transfer Company, as plaintiff, to prevent the petitioner, The Black and White Taxicab and Transfer Company, from interfering with the carrying out of a contract between the plaintiff and the other defendant, The Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company. The plaintiff is a corporation of Tennessee. It had a predecessor of the same name which was a corporation of Kentucky. Knowing that the Courts of Kentucky held contracts of the kind in question invalid and that the Courts of the United States maintained them as valid, a family that owned the Kentucky corporation procured the incorporation of the plaintiff and caused the other to be dissolved after conveying all the corporate property to the plaintiff. The new Tennessee corporation then proceeded to make with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company the contract above mentioned, by which the Railroad Company gave to it exclusive privileges in the station grounds, and two months later the Tennessee corporation brought this suit. The Circuit Court of Appeals, affirming a decree of the District Court, granted an injunction and upheld this contract. It expressly recognized that the decisions of the Kentucky Courts held that in Kentucky a railroad company could not grant such rights, but this being a ‘ question of general law ’ it went its own way regardless of the Courts of this State. 15 F. (2d) 509.
The Circuit Court of Appeals had so considerable a tradition behind it in deciding as it did that if I did not regard the case as exceptional I should not feel warranted in presenting my own convictions again after having stated them in Kuhn v. Fairmont Coal Company, 215 U. S. 349. But the question is important and in my opinion the prevailing doctrine has been accepted upon a subtle fallacy *533that never has been analyzed. • If I am right the fallacy has resulted in an unconstitutional assumption of powers by the Courts of the United States which no lapse of time or respectable array of opinion should make us hesitate to correct. Therefore I think it proper to state what I think the fallacy is. — The often repeated proposition of this and the lower Courts is that the parties are entitled to an independent judgment on matters of general law. By that phrase is meant matters that are not governed by any law of the United States or by any statute of the State — matters that in States other than Louisiana are governed in most respects by what is called the common law. It is through this phrase that what I think the fallacy comes in.
Books written about any branch of the common law treat it as a unit, cite cases from this Court, from the Circuit Courts of Appeals, from the State Courts, from England and the Colonies of England indiscriminately, and criticise them as right or wrong according to the writer’s notions of a single theory. It is very hard to resist the impression that there is one august corpus, to understand which clearly is the only task of any Court concerned. If there were such a transcendental body of law outside of any particular State but obligatory within it unless and until changed by statute, the Courts of the United States might be right in using their independent judgment as to what it was. But there is no such body of law. The fallacy and illusion that I think exist consist in supposing that there is this outside thing to be found. Law is a word used with different meanings, but law in the sense in which courts speak of it today does not exist without some definite authority behind it. The common law so far as it is enforced in a State, whether called common law or not, is not the common law generally but the law of that State existing by the authority of that State without regard to what it *534may have been in England or anywhere else. It may be adopted by statute in place of another system previously in force. Boquillas Cattle Co. v. Curtis, 213 U. S. 339, 345. But a general adoption of it does not prevent the State Courts from refusing to follow the English decisions upon a matter where the local conditions are different. Wear v. Kansas, 245 U. S. 154, 156, 157. It may be changed by statute, Baltimore & Ohio R. R. Co. v. Baugh, 149 U. S. 368, 378, as is done every day. It may be departed from deliberately by judicial decisions, as with regard to water rights, in States where the common law generally prevails. Louisiana is a living proof that it need not be adopted at all. (I do not know whether under the prevailing doctrine we should regard ourselves as authorities upon the general law of Louisiana superior to those trained in the system.) Whether and how far and in what sense a rule shall be adopted whether called common law or Kentucky law is for the State alone to decide.
If within the limits of the Constitution a State should declare one of the disputed rules of general law by statute there would be no doubt of the duty of all Courts to bow, whatever their private opinions might be. Mason v. United States, 260 U. S. 545, 555. Gulf Refining Co. v. United States, 269 U. S. 125, 137. I see no reason why it should have less effect when it speaks by its other voice. See Benedict v. Ratner, 268 U. S. 353, Sim v. Edenborn, 242 U. S. 131. If a state constitution should declare that on all matters of general law the decisions of the highest Court should establish the law until modified by statute or by a later decision of the same Court, I do not perceive how it would be possible for a Court of the United States to refuse to follow what the State Court decided in that domain. But when the constitution of a State establishes a Supreme Court it by implication does make that declaration as clearly as if it had said it in express words, so *535far as it is not interfered with by the superior power of the United States. The Supreme Court of a State does something more than make a scientific inquiry into a fact outside of and independent of it. It says, with an authority that no one denies, except when a citizen of another State is able to invoke an exceptional jurisdiction, that thus the law is and shall be. Whether it be said to make or to declare the law, it deals with the law of the State with equal authority however its function may be described.
Mr. Justice Story in Swift v. Tyson, 16 Peters, 1, evidently under the tacit domination of the fallacy to which I have referred, devotes some energy to showing that § 34 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, c. 20, refers only to statutes when it provides that except as excepted the laws of the several States shall be regarded as rules of decision in trials at common law in Courts of the United States. An examination of the original document by a most competent hand has shown that Mr. Justice Story probably was wrong if anyone is interested to inquire what the framers of the instrument meant. 37 Harvard Law Review, 49, at pp. 81-88. But this question is deeper than that; it is a question of the authority by which certain particular acts, here the grant of exclusive privileges in a railroad station, are governed. In my opinion the authority and only authority is the State, and if that be so, the voice adopted by the State as its own should utter the last word. • I should leave Swift v. Tyson undisturbed, as I indicated in Kuhn v. Fairmont Coal Co., but I would not allow it to spread the assumed dominion into new fields.
In view of what I have said it is not necessary for me to give subordinate and narrower reasons for my opinion that the decision below should be reversed. But there are adequate reasons short of what I think should be recognized. This is a question concerning the lawful use of land in Kentucky by a corporation chartered by Ken*536tucky. The policy of Kentucky with regard to it has been settled in Kentucky for more than thirty-five years. McConnell v. Pedigo, 92 Ky. 465. (1892.) Even under the rule that I combat, it has been recognized that a settled line of state decisions was conclusive to establish a rule of property or the public policy of the State. Hartford Fire Insurance Co. v. Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Ry. Co., 175 U. S. 91, 100. I should have supposed that what arrangements could or could not be made for the use of a piece of land was a purely local question, on which, if on anything, the State should have its own way and the State Courts should be taken to declare what the State wills. See especially Smith Middlings Purifier Co. v. McGroarty, 136 U. S. 237, 241.
Mr. Justice Brandéis and Mr. Justice Stone concur in this opinion.