Ex parte State Insurance Company/Opinion of the Court

Much argument is addressed to us on the construction of the act of March 3d, 1873, concerning the District and Circuit Courts of Alabama, especially whether by that act the Circuit Court sitting at Mobile has circuit court jurisdiction over the whole State or not. In the view we take of the present case it is not necessary for us to decide that question.

Prior to that time the District Court of the United States for the Middle District of Alabama was a court invested with circuit court powers: Among those powers, in our opinion, was that of receiving and exercising jurisdiction over cases removed from the State courts within its territorial limits. The case before us was of that class. No question is raised that the requirements of the law for the removal were complied with. The order for the removal was made on the 11th day of January, 1873, and the papers filed in the office of the clerk of the Circuit Court for the Southern District on the 18th day of the same month.

The order of the State court was that 'this cause be removed out of this court into the Circuit Court of the United States at Mobile, Alabama, that being the Circuit Court of the United States for this district.' The county of Barbour, in which the State court sat and made this order, was in the Middle District of Alabama, and as, in our judgment, the case, if to be removed at all, should have been removed to the District Court for that district, to be disposed of in the exercise of its circuit court powers, we think the order of the State court was void. That it conferred no jurisdiction of the case on the Circuit Court for the Southern District of Alabama, because it could take none as the law then stood. Whatever may by the effect of the subsequent act of March 3d, 1873, on the jurisdiction of all these courts, there is nothing in it which removes the difficulty in the present case.

The Circuit Court at Mobile was, therefore, right in refusing to hear the case, and ordering it to be stricken from the docket, and the mandamus now asked for is

DENIED.