Court Opinion

ID: 9766740
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 04:57:28.695395+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:25.450047
License: Public Domain

WELLIVER, Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. If there is such a thing as a factual situation which would justify the application of the doctrine of forum non conveniens, this would have to be the case.
I cannot join in what I perceive to be the eternal hope held out by the principal opin*745-747ion to defendants. I would either follow our brothers from Illinois1 and apply the doctrine of forum non conveniens and stop the building of our “Madison County, Illinois,” or I would frankly admit that Elliott v. Johnson, 292 S.W.2d 589 (Mo.1956) is an aberration among our Missouri cases, which otherwise never have applied the doctrine of forum non conveniens to any set of facts, and would overrule it.
Neither the extensive treatise, nor the purported analysis and test, make the result reached by the majority any more palpable to the defendant. The fact remains that in all of the F.E.L.A. cases reported and in the dozens of cases denied by us on application for original writs, which are not reported, this Court has never applied the doctrine of forum non conveniens to a F.E.L.A. case.2 Our rulings have not been restricted to the single railroad which happens to have its home office in St. Louis. The city of St. Louis has been and continues to be our “Madison County, Illinois.”

. Wiesner v. Missouri Pacific R. Co., 98 Ill.2d 359, 74 Ill.Dec. 596, 456 N.E.2d 93 (1986).

. See, e.g., State ex rel. Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific R. Co. v. Riederer, 454 S.W.2d 36 (Mo. banc 1970); Hayman v. Southern Pacific Co., 278 S.W.2d 749 (Mo. 1955); State ex rel. Southern R. Co. v. Mayfield, 240 S.W.2d 106 (Mo. banc 1951), overruled State ex rel. Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific R. Co. v. Riederer, 454 S.W.2d 36 (Mo. banc 1970); Ingle v. Illinois Central Gulf R. Co., 608 S.W.2d 76 (Mo.App.1980), cert. denied, 450 U.S. 916 (1981); cf. Loftus v. Lee, 308 S.W.2d 654 (Mo.1958).