Mosher v. City of Phoenix

• Decision Date: 07 November 1932
• Docket Number: Nos. 6 and 7,s. 6 and 7
• Citation: 77 L.Ed. 148,287 U.S. 29,53 S.Ct. 67
• Parties: MOSHER v. CITY OF PHOENIX (two cases)
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

287 U.S. 29

53 S.Ct. 67

77 L.Ed. 148

MOSHER

v CITY OF PHOENIX (two cases).

Nos. 6 and 7.

Argued Oct. 17, 1932.

Decided Nov. 7, 1932.

Mr. John W. Ray, of Phoenix, Ariz., for petitioner.

Mr. Sidman I. Barber, of Boise, Idaho, for respondent.

Mr. Chief Justice HUGHES delivered the opinion of the Court.

Decrees dismissing the bills of complaint for the want of jurisdiction were affirmed by the Circuit Court of Appeals (54 F.(2d) 777, 778), and writs of certiorari were granted limited to the question of the jurisdiction of the District Court as a federal court. 285 U.S. 535, 52 S.Ct. 456, 76 L.Ed. 929.

There is no diversity of citizenship, and jurisdiction depends upon the presentation by the bills of complaint of a substantial federal question. Jurisdiction is thus determined by the allegations of the bills and not by the way the facts turn out or by a decision of the merits. Pacific Electric Railway Company v. Los Angeles, 194 U.S. 112, 118, 24 S.Ct. 586, 48 L.Ed. 896; Columbus Railway, Power & Light Co. v. Columbus, Ohio, 249 U.S. 399, 406, 39 S.Ct. 349, 63 L.Ed. 669, 6 A.L.R. 1648; South Covington & Cincinnati Street Rwy. Co. v. Newport, Ky., 259 U.S. 97, 99, 42 S.Ct. 418, 66 L.Ed. 842.

The suits were brought by petitioner as owner of parcels of land in the city of Phoenix, Ariz., to restrain the city from appropriating her land for purposes of a street improvement. The Circuit Court of Appeals, having decided in Collins v. City of Phoenix, 54 F.(2d) 770 (where jurisdiction of the federal court rested on diversity of citizenship), that the proceedings of the city were not authorized by the statutes of Arizona,¹ held in the instant cases that the petitioner, having alleged that the proceedings were void under the state law, had not presented a substantial federal question. But petitioner did not stop with allegations as to the city's authority under state law. Petitioner also alleged in No. 6, after setting forth her title, her claim as to the width of the street in question, and the action of the city in including her property as a part of the street, and in contracting for the street improvement upon that basis, that the city was thereby 'attempting to take and appropriate the property of plaintiff without compensation, and to take and appropriate and use same and deprive the said plaintiff of the permanent use thereof without due process of law, or any process of law, * * * and in violation of the rights of plaintiff as guaranteed her under the Constitution of the United States, and particularly under Amendments 5 and 14 thereof, which plaintiff here and now pleads and relies on for her protection against the wrongs and threatened wrongs of the defendant city in the proposed taking of her property as hereinbefore described.' And this appeal to the Fourteenth Amendment was reiterated as against the action of the city which was alleged to have been taken 'under the authority'...