Tullock v. Mulvane

Statement by Mr. Justice White:

George P. Wescott and Samuel Hanson were complainants in a bill in equity which was filed, on January 13, 1893, in the circuit court of the United States for the district of Kansas. Joab Mulvane and various other persons and corporations were made defendants to the bill. The principal relief sought was to compel the specific performance of a contract alleged to have been entered into between the complainants and Mulvane for the sale by the latter and purchase by the former of all the capital stock of the Topeka Water Supply Company, a Kansas corporation, also a defendant to the suit. Incidentally it was sought to annul a purported sale of the waterworks plant to another of the defendants, the Topeka Water Company, a Kansas corporation, which it was asserted had been organized by Mulvane. The bill also sought to prevent the Topeka Water Company from encumbering the plant with a mortgage which, it was averred, was about to be executed, and to restrain the issuing and negotiation of bonds proposed to be secured by such mortgage and the sale or disposition of stock of both the Topeka Water Supply Company and the Topeka Water Company. The members of a copartnership, styled Coffin & Stanton, doing business in the city of New York, whom it was charged were offering to the public for sale the bonds so proposed to be issued, were likewise joined as defendants in the bill.

On February 13, 1890, the court ordered a temporary injunction to issue, as prayed, upon the giving of an approved bond. Two days later, however, it was ordered that instead of a bond the complainants 'may deposit with the clerk of this court the sum of $75,000 in cash, and that said deposit shall stand for a bond for all damages from the commencement of this suit until the further order of the court, whereby said complainants will be obligated and bound to pay to the defendants all costs and damages aforesaid, if it shall be finally held that said injunction or restraining order was improvidently granted.'

On April 4, 1890, upon a hearing, the court sustained a motion which had been filed on behalf of Coffin & Stanton to dissolve the temporary injunction. The dissolution was predicated upon the ruling that an indispensable party had not been made a defendant, and could not be made without ousting the jurisdiction of the court, because such party defendant and the plaintiffs were citizens of the same state.

Thereafter, on June 3, 1890, by leave of court, a formal bond was substituted for the cash deposit which had been made under the order of the court previously stated. A. J. Tullock and W. M. D. Lee were the sureties. The bond recited the order for an injunction, the subsequent permission to deposit cash in lieu of a bond, the making of such cash deposit, the withdrawal of the deposit with the sanction of the court on the condition that a bond be executed. The fact that the injunction had been in the meanwhile dissolved by the court was also recited. The condition of the bond is reproduced in the margin.

In October, 1890, pursuant to a stipulation made between complainants and certain of the defendants, filed in the cause, the bill was dismissed as to all the defendants except Mulvane, and so much of the bill as sought a specific performance of the alleged contract between complainants and Mulvane was withdrawn. By the stipulation the defendants who were dismissed from the cause expressly waived all right of action upon the injunction bond or otherwise, by reason of the allowance of the temporary injunction.

On September 26, 1892, upon the hearing of the cause as between complainants and Mulvane, the bill was dismissed. The case was then appealed to the circuit court of appeals for the eighth circuit. [7 C. C. A. 242, 19 U.S. App. 125, 58 Fed. 305.] That court decided the appeal on the assumption that the question for decision was whether, in view of all the circumstances attending the making of the agreement between complainants and Mulvane, it was one which a court of equity could specifically enforce. The court observed that the cause had evidently been argued and disposed of in the court below on the theory that under the stipulation, even though the right to have specific performance had been waived, nevertheless damages might be assessed by a court of equity as for a breach of the contract, if the court was of opinion that the appellants were, at the time the bill was filed, entitled to specific performance. Assuming, then, the regularity of this procedure, and its power as an equity court to execute the agreement, the court reviewed the evidence, and held that the complainants were not at the time the bill was filed entitled to the specific performance of the contract, for the reason that they had never put the defendant Mulvane in default by tendering him the sum which he was entitled to receive under the contract of sale, to enforce which the bill had been filed. The court further observed:

'It is assigned for error that the circuit court erred in dissolving the temporary injunction as well as in dismissing the bill on the ground heretofore stated. As the first of these assignments was somewhat pressed on the argument, it becomes necessary to say, and we think it is all sufficient to say, that the appellants cannot be heard to complain in this court of the order dissolving the temporary injunction after voluntarily withdrawing so much of their bill as sought a specific performance of the alleged contract. An injunction could only be awarded as an incident to that species of equitable relief, and when the allegations and the prayer of the bill looking to that form of relief were withdrawn, the injunction necessarily shared the same fate.'

Intermediate the dismissal of the bill by the circuit court and the affirmance of the decree of dismissal by the circuit court of appeals, Mulvane, on November 5, 1892, instituted the present action in the state district court of Shawnee county, Kansas, against A. J. Tullock and W. M. D. Lee, the sureties upon the injunction bond above referred

The action in the state court was tried to sought for the sum of $75,000 as damages sustained by reason of the injunction. Service was not made upon Lee, however, and the action was prosecuted solely against Tullock. An answer was filed, which consisted of a general denial and a plea that the action was prematurely brought because of the pendency of the appeal in the circuit court of appeals.

The action in the state court was tried to a jury. Because of the ruling by the trial judge, in excluding evidence as to expenditures for attorneys' fees in procuring the dissolution of the injunction, Mulvane prosecuted error, and the judgment entered by the trial court was held by the supreme court of Kansas to be erroneous because of such ruling. 58 Kan. 622, 50 Pac. 897.

A new trial was thereupon had in the lower court. At this trial, on the offer by Mulvane, the plaintiff, of evidence tending to show payments made by him for attorneys' fees, such evidence was objected to as follows:

'The defendant further objects because it appears that this bond was given in a proceeding in the Federal court, and under the law of the United States governing the liability of parties for damages on bonds or in such proceeding in Federal courts attorneys' fees are not included.'

At the close of all the evidence, the court allowed the respective parties to amend their pleadings. The petition was amended, among other particulars, by setting out specifically the sum of asserted damage resulting from the payments alleged to have been made by Mulvane to various attorneys in resisting the allowance and procuring the dissolution of the injunction. In the amendment of the answer it was specifically pleaded that the sums paid to the attorneys by Mulvane were not elements of damage embraced within the terms of the injunction bond, if such bond was construed and enforced according to the rules applicable in the courts of the United States, as expounded by the Supreme Court of the United States. It was asserted that the bond must be measured by the principles controlling in the court where it was given, and that to hold otherwise would deprive the surety of the protection of the law of the United States, in contemplation of which he had contracted.

After the amendments and in negation of requests for instructions to the jury made by the plaintiff, the defendant asked the court to charge in substance as follows: 1. That as by the condition of the bond liability could not arise until it had been finally determined by the United States court, that the injunction ought not to have been granted, the sureties upon the bond were discharged from liability by the effect of the stipulation filed in the cause in which the injunction had been granted, whereby it resulted that a final determination by the court whether the injunction ought not to have been granted was by consent of parties prevented. 2. If the stipulation had not the effect thus claimed, then at the time the action on the bond was commenced an appeal was pending in the circuit court of appeals of the United States from the judgment rendered in the cause, wherein the injunction had been allowed and the bond given, and that the action upon the bond was premature. In addition, the immunity which had been previously asserted, arising from the rule governing in the courts of the United States on the subject of attorneys' fees, was, in view of the pleadings and the prior proceedings in the case, reiterated by a request for an instruction that no attorneys' fees could be recovered on the bonds. All the requests of the defendant having been denied and the court having charged the jury to the contrary, a verdict was returned in the sum of $25,000, of which it may be inferred that about the sum of $20,000 was for payments which Mulvane asserted he had made on his own behalf to the attorneys who had represented his interest in resisting the allowance of and procuring the dissolution of the injunction, albeit that most of the attorneys to whom the payments in question were made were likewise attorneys of record for the other defendants who had specifically in the stipulation waived all claims of damages growing out of the injunction. From the judgment rendered on the verdict of the jury the cause was carried to the supreme court of Kansas, and in that court it was affirmed. 61 Kan. 650, 60 Pac. 749. The opinion of the court in effect considered and disposed of the claims of alleged Federal right which have been previously referred to, and held them to be untenable. To this judgment of affirmance error was prosecuted and the cause is here for review.

Messrs. W. H. Rossington, Charles Blood Smith, and Clifford Histed for plaintiff in error.

Messrs. N. H. Loomis, A. L. Williams, and Overmyer, Mulvane, & Ganult for defendant in error.

Mr. Justice White, after making the foregoing statement, delivered the opinion of the court: The assignments of error, though fourteen in number, are reducible to three propositions.

1. A contention that as the bond provided for a liability only in case it was finally decided that the injunction was wrongfully granted, no recovery could be had upon the bond, because the stipulation between the complainants and certain of the defendants had the effect of rendering it impossible to have a final determination in the courts of the United Staees whether the injuntion ought originally to have been granted.

2. A claim on the part of the defendant that as the bond for injunction was executed under the order of a court of equity of the United States, and therefore by an authority exercised under the United States, and as liability was only to arise when it had been finally decided that the injunction ought not to have been granted, action on the bond could not be brought pending an appeal to the circuit court of appeals of the United States, and the final determination by that court of the controversy.

3. An assertion that as, by the settled rule of the courts of equity of the United States, attorneys' fees were not an element of damage covered by the terms of an injunction bond given in such court, recovery of such fees on such bond was not within the purview of the bond when construed with reference to and by the light of the authority under which the bond was given.

It is urged by the defendant in error that these contentions involve no Federal question, and that if they do they were not sufficiently set up in the lower courts, and therefore this court has no jurisdiction to review them. We dispose at once of the contention that if the propositions involve Federal questions they were not duly raised below, by referring to the statement which we have made of the case, whereby it appears that the contentions were raised below by the pleadings, by the objections to evidence, and by the requests for instructions, and indeed as so raised were expressly considered and directly passed upon by both the trial court and the supreme court of the state of Kansas, which latter fact in and of itself suffices to present the Federal question, even if it had been otherwise ambiguously raised on the record, which is not the case. F. G. Oxley Stave co. v. Butler County, 166 U.S. 648, 41 L. ed. 1149, 17 Sup. Ct. Rep. 709.

In determining whether these Federal questions are involved we shall for the moment take it for granted that the premises upon which such asserted questions rest are well founded, and if under such hypothesis we find that there is jurisdiction it will then be our duty to put such assumption out of view and determine the merits of the contentions.

Whilst apparently the propositions involve several distinct assertions of Federal right, in their ultimate analysis they reduce themselves to one and the same contention, that is, that a bond given for an injunction in an equity cause in a court of the United States is to be construed with reference to the liability administered in the courts of the United States on that subject as settled by this court. That this fundamental proposition embraces all the contentions would seem to be clear, when it is borne in mind that the controversies as to the stipulation and as to the pendency of the cause in the circuit court of appeals both assert the generic right of the defendant to have the obligations under the bond measured and determined by the law prevailing in the courts of the United States, and the claim as to the attorneys' fees propounds but the same right as to one of the elements of damage which it was asserted the bond embraced. Whilst the unity of the propositions is thus demonstrable, as in the court below and in argument they have been separately treated and different considerations have been assumed to apply to them, we shall consider the propositions separately.

We embrace the first two contentions under one heading, as follows:

First. Did the claim that there had been no breach of the condition of the bond because of the stipulation filed in the cause in which the bond was given and because of the pendency of the appeal in the circuit court of appeals present Federal questions, and, if yes, were they well founded?

It may not, we think, be doubted that a bond for injunction in an equity court of the United States given under the order of such court is a bond executed in and by virtue 'of an authority exercised under the United States.' Rev. Stat. § 709. Certainly, the courts of the United States derive all their powers from the Constitution and laws of the United States, and their authority is therefore exercised thereunder. Being, then, an obligation entered into by virtue of such authority, the conclusion cannot be escaped that the defense specially set up, that no liability on the bond could arise until the court of the United States in which the controversy was pending had finally determined that the injunction should not have been granted, was the assertion of an immunity from liability depending on an authority exercised under the United States, and therefore necessarily involved the decision of a Federal question. To state the result which must necessarily flow from a contrary, deduction is sufficient of itself to demonstrate the unsoundness of the reasoning by which the non-Federal nature of the question can alone be upheld. For it is clear that if it be true that the bond given in a Federal court of equity on the granting of an injunction is not to be construed with reference to the rules of law applicable to such bonds in such court, then there can be no certain general rule by which to determine the liability of the obligors upon the bond. Their responsibility would be one thing in a court of the United States and a different thing in the courts of the various states, which would imply that the parties did not contract with reference to any definite rule of liability. Indeed, the argument conduces to a conclusion which necessarily cripples the power of the court under whose order an injunction bond is executed. It is settled that such court has the inherent right to set the bond aside and to determine in its discretion whether recovery could be had upon it. Russell v. Farley, 105 U.S. 433, 26 L. ed. 1060. And yet if the liability upon the bond when given can be measured in courts other than the court requiring the execution of the bond, by a wholly different rule of liability from that which obtained in the court which had ordered the giving of the bond, it must follow that, although the latter court had decreed that the injunction had rightfully issued, yet in an action upon the injunction bond in another forum the sureties might be made to respond in damages without hope of redress.

A reference to some of the decided cases concerning what constitutes a claim of immunity arising from an authority exercised under the United States will serve at once to refute the contention that no Federal question is here presented.

In Dupasseur v. Rochereau, 21 Wall. 130, 22 L. ed. 588, the question for decision was whether a state court had given due effect to a decree of a court of the United States, and it was asserted that the contention that it had not presented no Federal question. Speaking through Mr. Justice Bradley, the court said (p. 134, L. ed. p. 590):