Court Opinion

ID: 9643313
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 20:25:20.593622+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:59.232452
License: Public Domain

L. HAND, Chief Judge
(concurring in result).
. I agree that the decision below followed from what has been decided before, and, had my brother been content with a caveat that left open whether recovery in the case at bar would not bar any employees who later prosecuted claims that the administrator has included in this action, possibly I might have said nothing, though I think that even then I might have felt bound to speak. But he has not done so; for, although he does not definitely commit us to a decision upon the point, he more than intimates an opposite opinion, from which I differ so positively that I cannot be silent. There is good reason for saying that the Administrator ought to have power to sue on behalf of employees, who do not sue for themselves; I haye no doubt that many deserving claims might otherwise be lost. Even so, it is a long step to extend the ancient practice of courts of equity to situations in which the claims recovered, as an incident to an injunction, belong to others; and it is an utterly indefensible step, unless he represents the employees in his recovery on their behalf. Moreover, if he does so represent them, I cannot understand on what theory they are not bound by the judgment, like any other persons whose claims are prosecuted by an authorized representative. If employers are to be excepted from the universally accepted doctrine that a claim once decided is finally decided unless the decision is revoked, I should demand the most inescapable warrant for it in the words used. Indeed, were I among those who find those results unconstitutional, which chance to be deeply repugnant to *141their personal feelings, I might even invoke the Fifth Amendment; for it seems to me to the last degree oppressive to hold that, after an employer has been put to a trial upon the claims of A, B, C and D, and has either succeeded in proving that he owes them nothing, or less than they demand, he may be later subjected to a series of actions by those very employees upon those very claims. I trust that I shall always be docile to what Congress may command; but for a result so shocking to my notions of fair play, I must find words which leave me no alternative. I do not find them; and I will not search for their equivalent in that circumambient aura, so often euphemistically described as “the policy of the statute.”