Court Opinion

ID: 9447794
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 22:44:52.244333+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:11.939426
License: Public Domain

JONES, Circuit Judge
(concurring specially).
I see no reason for the saying of much that the majority says in holding that the appellant should be permitted to amend. A party is entitled to amend once as a matter of course at any time before a responsive pleading is filed. Rule 15(a), Fed.Rules Civ.Proc., 28 U.S.C.A. Motions are not responsive pleadings. 1 A Barron.& Holtzoff, Federal Practice and Procedure 714, § 443. The amendment was intended to supply the deficiencies noted by the District Court in its opinion. See Note 4 of the opinion of the majority. The amendment was tendered before the order of dismissal was entered. Even if the order had preceded the tender of the amendment, the entry of the order of dismissal without leave to amend would have been error. Dowdy v. Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Company, 5 Cir., 1959, 267 F.2d 827. These principles are settled and, for my part, determine the question of the right to amend. I see no reason to say more on that question.
Whether, as the majority has determined, Rule 15(a) declares “an affirmative policy,” and whether the terms in which it does so are “emphatic,” seems to me to be unimportant, although it might be difficult to find the source of the dramatic emphasis attributed to this particular clause of the Rules. The first and only amendment tendered by the appellant was the one which the district court disallowed. Why then does the majority find it necessary to say that, where leave to file an amendment is required, the provision of the rule that “leave shall be freely given” is not a “mechanical absolute ?” I might add that this phrase is one which I have not before encountered. “Mechanical” has to do with tools or machines. Cf. Mullinnix v. State, 42 Tex.Crim.R. 526, 60 S.W. 768. In the smaller dictionaries that most of us use the word “absolute” is an adjective. “Its most ordinary signification is ‘unrestricted’ or ‘unconditional.’ ” Columbia Water-Power Co. v. Columbia Electric Street Railway Light and Power Company, 172 U.S. 475, 19 S.Ct. 247, 43 L.Ed. 521. In metaphysics and in theology and perhaps in physics, chemistry, and others of the more exact sciences, “absolute” has a meaning as a noun, but not in any sense here germane. The task of writing the headnote for this gloss upon the rule is not mine and I do not envy him who has it.
Much else of what is said, while possibly sound in law and logic, does not seem to me to be essential to the decision of the questions presented by this appeal.