Court Opinion

ID: 9650680
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 15:48:32.788494+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:25.097691
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge
(concurring):
I concur in the order amending the opinion. Certainly my brethren should be allowed to draw such sustenance as they can for their admittedly technical ruling3 from the plaintiff’s persistence in sticking by the legal theory of the case which he developed after the record was made up in preference to returning to the at least equally available theory upon which the case was tried below. Possibly a change in strategy might have been the shrewder approach; at any rate, we are now spared the pain of deciding whether a petition for rehearing can restore to us that jurisdiction of which a party’s brief or oral argument can rob us. Recent decisions of this court suggest that a matter which should' lie easily in the court’s discretion, see 11 Geo.Wash.L.Rev. 121, is now in a rather hopeless procedural mess. Compare Richard Irvin & Co. v. Westinghouse Air Brake Co., 2 Cir., 121 F.2d 429 (decision below reversed in part, since invalidity is moot upon a finding of non-infringement); Hazeltine Corp. v. Emerson Television-Radio, Inc., 2 Cir., 129 F.2d 580 (decision below affirmed on one, or possibly two, of the several grounds upon which it was entered); Aero Spark Plug Co. v. B. G. Corp., 2 Cir., 130 F.2d 290 (decision below affirmed for non-infringement only, against the objections of Judge Frank); K. Kaufmann & Co. v. Leitman, 2 Cir., 131 F.2d 308 (decision below, of non-infringement alone, affirmed for invalidity alone, it being then unnecessary to decide as to infringement) ; the present case (the reviewing court lacks jurisdiction which the trial court has) ; and Franklin v. Masonite Corp., 2 Cir., Dec. 31, 1942, 132 F.2d 800 (decision below of invalidity and infringement affirmed for non-infringement).

 None of the eases relied on seems to me to have pertinency, no one involves merely a change in legal theory in appellant’s brief after an appeal has been in all respects properly taken.