Court Opinion

ID: 9520429
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 01:39:42.740723+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:46:14.421287
License: Public Domain

Black, J.
(concurring). “The fact that there is a legal remedy is not the criterion; that legal remedy, both in respect to its final relief and its modes of obtaining the relief, must be as efficient as the remedy which equity would confer under the same circumstances, or else the concurrent jurisdiction attaches.” 1 Pomeroy’s Equity Jurisprudence (5th ed), § 180, pp 254, 255.*
Whatever view or views we may divisively take of thoroughly worked-over section 53 of the general *502property tax law (CL 1948, § 211.53 [Stat Ann 1960 Rev § 7.97]), I hold that the presence of an agreeably constituted and duly tried class action, conjoined with equity’s canon that the very necessity of an undue multiplicity of suits in itself constitutes the inadequacy of the remedy at law which confers equitable jurisdiction,* results or should result in equity’s triumph over defendants’ motion to the jurisdiction.
This suit for injunctive relief involves more than 200 separately and specially assessed parcels of land, divided into 2 special assessment districts. It was inconvenient as well as impossible to directly bring in all interested parties, and so Court Rule No 16 (1945) was duly employed. All requisites of the practice were followed, including Mr. Honigman’s suggestion (Honigman,-Court Rules Annotated, 1959 pocket supplement, pp 27, 28) that the handing down of Mullene v. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co., 339 US 306 (70 S Ct 652, 94 L ed 865), requires additional care in employment of the rule.
The interest of all special assessees was common. The situation was complicated, so far as adequacy of the asserted legal remedy might be concerned, by the fact that the assessments in question were levied in 1947; whereas these suits were not instituted until 1956 and were not brought to hearing until July of 1958. Title to many of the involved parcels had been transferred in the meantime, and so the directly represented parties agreed that the pivot question — validity of the city commission’s resolution to *503specially assess all such parcels — should proceed to judicial determination in a constituted class action.
The circuit court in chancery had jurisdiction to proceed, as against defendants’ contention that all plaintiffs and all parties in interest had an adequate remedy at law, whether or not it be true that the owner of each specially assessed parcel had a right to pay each instalment of such assessment as it came due, and then sue for what he had paid on each occasion. How many hundreds of suits at law this would have entailed, had payment and suit been made and started within the limited time allotted by said section 53, need not be calculated. Obviously the number would add up to the equitably understood phrase, “a multiplicity of suits.”
Haggerty v. City of Dearborn, 332 Mich 304, is not opposed to present support of equity’s jurisdiction. One special levy on 1 parcel only was involved. There was but 1 plaintiff, and he was the complaining owner of such parcel. No question of multiplicity was involved and there was. no occasion for employment of Court Eule No 16 (1945). The adequacy of the legal remedy in that case proves but well the inadequacy of the legal remedy in this class action.

 See application of this rule in Powers v. Fisher, 279 Mich 442, 447, and. Haylor v. Grigg-Hanna Lumber & Box Co., 287 Mich 127, 134.

 “It is sometimes one of the very foundations of the concurrent jurisdiction, — an efficient cause of its existence. In fact, the ‘multiplicity of suits’ which is to be prevented constitutes the very inadequacy of legal methods and remedies which calls the concurrent jurisdiction into being under such circumstances, and authorizes it to adjudicate upon purely legal rights, and confer purely legal reliefs.” 1 Pomeroy’s Equity Jurisprudence (5th ed), § 243, p 462.