Court Opinion

ID: 9444183
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:44:45.354218+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:45.294868
License: Public Domain

WOODROUGH, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) .
The federal District Court of Minnesota has entered two judgments against the appellant Mrs. Bettinger by the terms of which she is obligated to pay heavy damages to persons injured in a certain automobile collision and she is also denied the automobile ■ insurance purporting to cover the accident which she admittedly bought and fully paid for. The court sitting with a jury first adjudged that she was the owner of the *207car that was negligently driven into collision and therefore she was responsible for the resultant damages, and thereafter the same court (another judge presiding) adjudged that she was not the owner of the car and because she was not the owner she had no insurance in respect to it.
The federal court had jurisdiction by reason of diversity of citizenship and the federal declaratory judgment Act and the applicable procedure for the determination of the rights of all the litigant parties, that is, the injured persons, Mrs. Bettinger and the insurance companies, was the federal procedure. In the course of the proceedings all of those litigants appeared before the court when the insurance companies requested the court to take up the declaratory judgment case of the companies against Mrs. Bettinger ahead of the damage cases pending against her.
It was then apparent that the fundamental disputed question of fact that was put in issue in the pleadings of each of the parties litigant, and which had to be judicially determined in order to accord justice to any or all of them, was whether or not Mrs. Bettinger was the owner of the car that did the damage.
The court, on consideration, declined the insurance companies’ request to take their case up first and it thereby put them on notice that a trial and judicial determination of the fact issue as to ownership of the car would be made in the damage cases.
The insurance companies chose not to produce the evidence they had on the issue of Mrs. Bettinger’s ownership, but purposely stood by while the court tried out the issue, as justly and fairly as it was allowed to do, on the evidence that was adduced in the damage cases. Its solemn final determination was as stated, that Mrs. Bettinger was the owner of the car and liable for the damages.
It seems to me that the elemental principles of the law relating to indemnities then forbade the insurance companies to go back before the same court and assert against Mrs. Bettinger that she was not the owner of the car which the court adjudged that she was the owner of.
It can be seen by anybody that to permit the companies to so disregard the court’s judgment invites the very anomaly of self contradicting decision that confronts us here. The federal courts and other courts are called on every day to decide justly between auto owners, injured persons, and insurance companies in respect to the rights and obligations accruing to them from collisions. A federal procedure in which it may be decided between them as to the controlling fact in controversy on one day that it is so, and on the next day that it is not so, is not compatible with sound dispensing of justice.
In this litigation Mrs. Bettinger’s liability and the validity of her insurance policy both depended on whether she owned the car at the time of the accident. The affirmance here of the District Court’s conclusions that she did own the car and that she did not own it is decided on first impression, nothing analogous being cited. The statutes imposing liability on automobile owners merely because of ownership are numerous as are the accidents, and the precedent of the affirmance by this court is of far-reaching importance.
I would reverse the judgment here appealed from and direct a judgment in accord with the finding made by the jury under the direction of the court that Mrs. Bettinger was the owner of the car involved in the accident.