Spring Company v. Knowlton/Dissent Harlan

MR. JUSTICE HARLAN dissenting.

This action was commenced in the Supreme Court of the State of New York. The present transcript is imperfect in that it does not contain all the proceedings in the courts of the State up to the removal of the case into the Circuit Court of the United States. It is, however, conceded, in the briefs of counsel, that Knowlton recovered in the Supreme Court a judgment which, upon a writ of error from the Commission of Appeals, was reversed upon the grounds stated in Knowlton v. Congress & Empire Spring Co., 57 N. Y. 518. The learned district judge who tried the case commences his opinion, which is incorporated in the transcript, with the statement that 'this case comes here by removal from from the State court, after a decision adverse to the plaintiff by the Commission of Appeals, reversing the judgment of the Supreme Court in favor of plaintiff, and ordering a new trial. 57 N. Y. 518.' He then proceeds to determine it upon principles of law different from those announced in that decision. Had it been again tried in the Supreme Court, judgment must have been rendered against these defendants in error, because the reversal was upon such grounds as precluded any recovery whatever by them. That decision should, in my opinion, have been accepted as the law of this case, although the proceedings in the Commission of Appeals are not set forth in the transcript. The reported case shows, beyond question, that it is the identical case now before us; at any rate, that it was between these parties and involved the same issues. We know that the adjudication of that court was long prior to the removal of this case, and that the questions arising upon this record have been once determined by a court of competent jurisdiction in a suit between the same parties touching the subject-matter now in controversy. All this plainly appears by that decision, the legal effect of which, the defendants in error should not be permitted to escape by removing the case into the Circuit Court.

Upon these grounds, and without expressing my own views upon the propositions of law discussed in the opinion of the court, I dissent from the judgment just rendered.