Mt Cotton Duck Company v. Alabama Interstate Power Company
Decision Date | 24 January 1916 |
Docket Number | No. 200,VERNON-WOODBERRY,200 |
Citation | 240 U.S. 30,60 L.Ed. 507,36 S.Ct. 234 |
Parties | MT.COTTON DUCK COMPANY et al., Plffs. in Err., v. ALABAMA INTERSTATE POWER COMPANY |
Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
Messrs. H. N. Randolph and Edwin G. Baetjer for plaintiffs in error.
Messrs. Thomas W. Martin, Ray Rushton, and Lawrence Macfarlane for defendant in error.
This is a petition for a writ of prohibition to prevent the probate court of Tallapoosa county from taking jurisdiction of condemnation proceedings instituted by the Alabama Interstate Power Company to take land, water, and water rights belonging to the petitioner. An alternative writ was issued, but the supreme court of the state ordered it to be quashed and the writ to be dismissed. 186 Ala. 622, 65 So. 287. The grounds of the petition are that the statutes of Alabama do not authorize the proceedings, and that if they do they contravene the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. The supreme court upheld the statutes and the jurisdiction of the probate court, but left the sufficiency of the petition for condemnation, whether every subject of which condemnation was sought could be condemned, and the ability of the Power Company to prove its case, to be determined in the condemnation case. There is a motion to dismiss the writ of error on the ground that the present decision is not final because it does not determine the merits; but this motion must be denied. Prohibition is a distinct suit and the judgment finally disposing of it is a final judgment within the meaning of the Judicial Code, act of March 3, 1911, chap. 231, § 237, 36 Stat. at L. 1087, 1156, Comp. Stat. 1913, §§ 968, 1214, under the statutes of Alabama and by the common law. Code of 1907, §§ 4864-4867, 4872; Weston v. Charleston, 2 Pet. 449, 464, 465, 7 L. ed. 481, 486, 487. The fact that it does not decide the merits of the principal suit is immaterial. It is not devoted to that point, but only to the preliminary question of the jurisdiction of the court in which that suit is brought.
The argument in favor of granting the writ, presented by the plaintiffs in error, is addressed in great part to matters with which this court has no concern. It is argued that the probate court could not be given jurisdiction of the condemnation proceedings consistently with the Constitution of the state; that under the same instrument the state legislature had no power to pass the condemnation acts; that the petition was insufficient to found jurisdiction of the case and was defective in various ways; that a part of the condemnation sought was bad under the statutes in any event; and that certain words in the Alabama Code under which it is sought to condemn rights below the contemplated dam of the Power Company never were properly enacted by the legislature of the state. All these points must be taken to have been decided adversely to the plaintiff in error by the supreme court of Alabama so far as they might furnish grounds for prohibition, and they all are matters on which this court follows the supreme court of the state.
The principal argument presented that is open here, is that the purpose of the condemnation is not a public one. The purpose of the Power Company's incorporation, and that for which it seeks to condemn property of the plaintiff in error, is to manufacture, supply, and sell to the public, power produced by water as a motive force. In the organic relations of modern society it may sometimes be hard to draw the line that is supposed to limit the authority of the legislature to exercise or delegate the power of eminent domain....
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